LIBRARY 

OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA. 

Gl  FT    OF 


Class 


CYRUS  HALL  McCORMICK 
HIS  LIFE  AND  WORK 


v 

UNIVERSITY 

OF 

£ALiFOBtii> 


CYRUS  HALL  McCORMICK 


HIS  LIFE  AND  WORK 


BY 


HERBERT  N.  CASSON 


AUTHOR  OF 


"  THK  ROMANCE  OF  STEEL,"  "  THE  ROMANCE  OF  THE  REAPER,"  ETC. 


ILLUSTRATED 


CHICAGO 

A.  C.  McCLURG  &  CO. 
1909 


COPYRIGHT 

A.  C.  McCLURG  &  CO. 
1909 

Published  October,  1908 
Entered  at  Stationers'  Hall,  London,  England 


R.  R.  DONNELLEY  *  SONS  COMPANY 
CHICAGO 


INTRODUCTION 

WHOEVER  wishes  to  understand  the  mak- 
ing of  the  United  States  must  read  the 
life  of  Cyrus  Hall  McCormick.  No  other  one 
man  so  truly  represented  the  dawn  of  the  in- 
dustrial era, —  the  grapple  of  the  pioneer  with 
the  crudities  of  a  new  country,  the  replacing  of 
muscle  with  machinery,  and  the  establishment 
of  better  ways  and  better  times  in  farm  and  city 
alike.  Beginning  exactly  one  hundred  years  ago, 
the  life  of  McCormick  spanned  the  heroic  period 
of  our  industrial  advancement,  when  great  things 
were  done  by  great  individuals.  To  know  Me- 
Cormick  is  to  know  what  type  of  man  it  was 
who  created  the  United  States  of  the  nineteenth 
century.  And  now  that  a  new  century  has 
arrived,  with  a  new  type  of  business  develop- 
ment, it  may  be  especially  instructive  to  review 
a  life  that  was  so  structural  and  so  fundamental. 
As  Professor  Simon  Newcomb  has  observed, 
"  It  is  impressive  to  think  how  few  men  we  should 
have  had  to  remove  from  the  earth  during  the 

[v] 

188515 


INTRODUCTION 

past  three  centuries  to  have  stopped  the  advance 
of  our  civilization."  From  this  point  of  view, 
there  are  few,  if  any,  who  will  appear  to  be 
more  indispensable  than  McCormick.  He  was 
not  brilliant.  He  was  not  picturesque.  He  was 
no  caterer  for  fame  or  favor.  But  he  was  as 
necessary  as  bread.  He  fed  his  country  as 
truly  as  Washington  created  it  and  Lincoln 
preserved  it.  He  abolished  our  agricultural 
peasantry  so  effectively  that  we  have  had  to 
import  our  muscle  from  foreign  countries  ever 
since.  And  he  added  an  immense  province  to 
the  new  empire  of  mind  over  matter,  the  ex- 
pansion of  which  has  been  and  is  now  the 
highest  and  most  important  of  all  human  en- 
deavors. 

As  the  master  builder  of  the  modern  business 
of  manufacturing  farm  machinery,  McCormick 
set  in  motion  so  many  forces  of  human  better- 
ment that  the  fruitfulness  of  his  life  can  never 
be  fully  told.  There  are  to-day  in  all  countries 
more  than  one  hundred  thousand  patents  for 
inventions  that  were  meant  to  lighten  the  labor 
of  the  farmer.  And  the  cereal  crop  of  the 

[vi] 


INTRODUCTION 

world  has  risen  with  incredible  gains,  until  this 
year  its  value  will  be  not  far  from  ten  thousand 
millions  of  dollars, —  very  nearly  the  equivalent 
of  all  the  gold  in  coin  and  jewelry  and  bullion. 
So,  if  there  is  not  power  and  fascination  in 
this  story,  it  will  be  the  fault  of  the  story-teller, 
and  not  of  his  theme.  The  story  itself  is  destined 
to  be  told  and  retold.  It  cannot  be  forgotten, 
because  it  is  one  of  those  rare  life-histories  that 
blazon  out  the  peculiar  genius  of  the  nation 
under  the  stress  of  a  new  experience.  As  it  is 
passed  on  from  generation  to  generation,  it  may 
finally  be  polished  into  an  Epic  of  the  Wheat, — 
the  tale  of  Man's  long  wrestle  with  Famine,  and 
how  he  won  at  last  by  creating  a  world-wide 
system  for  the  production  and  distribution  of 

the  Bread. 

H.  N.  C. 
CHICAGO,  September  1, 1909. 


Hi] 


CONTENTS 


CHAFTEE 

I.  THE  WORLD'S  NEED  OF  A  REAPER     .  .          1 

II.  THE  McCoRMicK  HOME  .          .          .  .13 

III.  THE  INVENTION  OF  THE  REAPER         .  .       26 

IV.  SIXTEEN  YEARS  OF  PIONEERING          .  .       48 
V.  THE  BUILDING  OF  THE  REAPER  BUSINESS  .       68 

VI.  THE  STRUGGLE  TO  PROTECT  PATENTS  .  .       91 

VII.  THE  EVOLUTION  OF  THE  REAPER        .  .105 

VIII.  THE  CONQUEST  OF  EUROPE        .         .  .123 

IX.  McCoRMICK  AS  A  MANUFACTURER         .  .139 

X.  CYRUS  H.  McCoRMICK  AS  A  MAN       .  .154 

XL  THE  REAPER  AND  THE  NATION           .  .188 

XII.  THE  REAPER  AND  THE  WORLD           .  .     203 

XIII.  GIVE  Us  THIS  DAY  OUR  DAILY  BREAD  .     234 

IXJMX  .  249 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

PORTRAIT  OF  CYRUS  HALL  McCoRMiCK  Frontispiece 

OLD    BLACKSMITH  SHOP   ON  WALNUT  GROVE    FARM, 

VIRGINIA 14 

THE   OLD    McCoRMiCK   HOMESTEAD,  WALNUT   GROVE 

FARM,  ROCKBRIDGE  COUNTY,  VIRGINIA  .  .  .18 
PORTRAIT  OF  ROBERT  McCoRMiCK  ....  22 
PORTRAIT  OF  MRS.  MARY  ANN  HALL  McCoRMiCK  .  24 
NEW  PROVIDENCE  CHURCH,  ROCKBRIDGE  COUNTY, 

VIRGINIA 28 

FACSIMILES    FROM    MANUSCRIPT   BY    MR.  MCCORMICK, 
GIVING  HIS  OWN  ACCOUNT  OF  THE  ORIGIN  OF  THE 
REAPER          ........       30 

FIRST  PRACTICAL  REAPING  MACHINE   ....       34 

THE  FIELD  ON  WHICH  THE  FIRST  McCoRMiCK  REAPER 

WAS  TRIED,  WALNUT  GROVE  FARM,  VIRGINIA          .       38 
INTERIOR  OF  BLACKSMITH  SHOP  IN  WHICH  C.  H.  MC- 
CORMICK BUILT  HIS  FIRST  REAPER          ...       42 
REAPING  WITH  CRUDE  KNIVES  IN  INDIA      ...       50 
REAPING  WITH  SICKLES  IN  ALGERIA     ....       56 

REAPING  WITH  CRADLES  IN  ILLINOIS   .         .         .         .60 

AN  EARLY  ADVERTISEMENT  FOR  MCCORMICK'S  PATENT 

VIRGINIA  REAPER 64 

THE  MCCORMICK  REAPER  OF  1847,  ON  WHICH  SEATS 

WERE  PLACED  FOR  THE  DRIVER  AND  THE  RAKER  .  70 
PORTRAIT  OF  CYRUS  HALL  McCoRMiCK,  1839  .  .76 
PANORAMIC  VIEW  SHOWING  THE  McCoRMiCK  REAPER 

WORKS     BEFORE    THE     CHICAGO     FlRE    OF     1871,     ON 

CHICAGO  RIVER,  EAST  OF  RUSH  STREET  BRIDGE  .  82 
MEN  OF  PROGRESS 96 


ILLUSTRATIONS 

THE  FIRST  McCoRMicK  SELF-RAKE  REAPING  MACHINE    112 
PORTRAIT  OF  CYRUS  HALL  McCoRMicK,  1858       .         .120 
PORTRAIT  OF  CYRUS  HALL  McCoRMicK,  1867       .         .136 
McCoRMicK  REAPER  CUTTING  ON  A  SIDE  HILL  IN  PENN- 
SYLVANIA         144 

REAPER  DRAWN  BY  OXEN  IN  ALGERIA        .         .         .150 
THE  REAPER  IN  HEAVY  GRAIN  .         .         .         .         .166 

HARVESTING  NEAR  SPOKANE,  WASHINGTON  .         .         .174 
PORTRAIT  OF  CYRUS  HALL  MCCORMICK,  1883       .         .182 
THE   WORKS   OF  THE   MCCORMICK   HARVESTING   MA- 
CHINE COMPANY     .         .         .         .         .         .         .190 

McCoRMicK  REAPER  IN  USE  IN  RUSSIA       .         .  •        .196 
CHART  SHOWING  RELATIVE  DISTRIBUTION  OF  VALUES  BY 
PRODUCING  COUNTRIES  OF  1908  OF  WORLD'S  PRODUC- 
TION OF  FIVE  PRINCIPAL  GRAINS     ....     206 

CHART  SHOWING  RELATIVE  VALUES    IN    1908   OF  THE 
WORLD'S    PRODUCTION    OF    THE    FIVE    PRINCIPAL 

GRAINS 206 

MAMMOTH    WHEAT-FIELD    IN    SOUTH    DAKOTA    WITH 
TWENTY  HARVESTERS  IN  LINE        ....     214 

HARVESTING  IN  ROUMANIA 222 

HARVESTING  HEAVY  GRAIN,  SOUTH  AMERICA        .         .     230 
INDIANS    REAPING    THEIR    HARVEST,    WHITE    EARTH, 
MINNESOTA    ....  ...     236 

A  HARVEST  SCENE  UPON  A  RUSSIAN  ESTATE  242 


[zH] 


CYRUS    HALL    McCORMICK 

HIS   LIFE  AND   WORK 


CHAPTER  I 

THE    WORLD'S   NEED   OF   A    REAPER 

TH1ITHER  by  a  very  strange  coincidence,  or 
-•— ^  as  a  phenomenon  of  the  instinct  of  self- 
preservation,  the  year  1809,  which  was  marked 
by  famine  and  tragedy  in  almost  every  quarter 
of  the  globe,  was  also  a  most  prolific  birthyear 
for  men  of  genius.  Into  this  year  came  Poe, 
Blackie,  and  Tennyson,  the  poet  laureates  of 
America,  Scotland,  and  England;  Chopin  and 
Mendelssohn,  the  apostles  of  sweeter  music; 
Lincoln,  who  kept  the  United  States  united; 
Baron  Haussemann,  the  beautifier  of  Paris; 
Proudhon,  the  prophet  of  communism;  Lord 
Houghton,  who  did  much  in  science,  and  Darwin, 
who  did  most;  FitzGerald,  who  made  known  the 
literature  of  Persia;  Bonar,  who  wrote  hymns; 
Kinglake,  who  wrote  histories;  Holmes,  who 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMI-CK 

wrote  sentiment  and  humor;  Gladstone,  who 
ennobled  the  politics  of  the  British  empire;  and 
McCormick,  who  gave  the  world  cheap  bread, 
and  whose  life-story  is  now  set  before  us  in  the 
following  pages. 

None  of  these  eminent  men,  except  Lincoln, 
began  life  in  as  remote  and  secluded  a  corner  of 
the  world  as  McCormick.  His  father's  farm 
was  at  the  northern  edge  of  Rockbridge  County, 
Virginia,  in  a  long,  thin  strip  of  fairly  fertile  land 
that  lay  crumpled  between  the  Blue  Ridge  on 
the  east  and  the  Alleghanies  on  the  west.  It 
was  eighteen  miles  south  of  the  nearest  town  of 
Staunton,  and  a  hundred  miles  from  the  Atlantic 
coast.  The  whole  region  was  a  quiet,  industrious 
valley,  whose  only  local  tragedy  had  been  an 
Indian  massacre  in  1764,  in  which  eighty  white 
settlers  had  been  put  to  death  by  a  horde  of 
savages. 

The  older  men  and  women  of  1809  could 
remember  when  wolf-heads  were  used  as  cur- 
rency; and  when  the  stocks  and  the  ducking- 
stool  stood  in  the  main  street  of  Staunton.  Also, 
they  were  fond  of  telling  how  the  farmers  of  the 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

valley,  when  they  heard  that  the  Revolution  had 
begun  in  Massachusetts,  carted  137  barrels  of 
flour  to  Frederick,  one  hundred  miles  north,  and 
ordered  it  sent  forthwith  to  the  needy  people  of 
Boston.  This  grew  to  be  one  of  the  most  pop- 
ular tales  of  local  history, —  an  epic  of  the  pa- 
triots who  fought  for  liberty,  not  with  gun- 
powder but  flour. 

By  1809  the  more  severe  hardships  of  the 
pioneer  days  had  been  overcome.  Houses  were 
still  built  of  logs,  but  they  were  larger  and  better 
furnished.  In  the  McCormick  homestead,  for 
instance,  there  was  a  parlor  which  had  the 
dignity  of  mahogany  furniture,  and  the  luxury 
of  books  and  a  carpet.  The  next-door  county 
of  Augusta  boasted  of  thirteen  carriages  and 
one  hundred  and  two  cut-glass  decanters.  And 
the  chief  sources  of  excitement  had  evolved  from 
Indian  raids  and  wolf-hunts  into  elections,  lot- 
teries, and  litigation. 

It  was,  perhaps  fortunate  for  the  child  McCor- 
mick that  he  was  born  in  such  an  out-of-the-way 
nook,  for  the  reason  that  in  1809  almost  the 
whole  civilized  world  was  in  a  turmoil.  In  Eng- 

[3] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

land  mobs  of  unemployed  men  and  women  were 
either  begging  for  bread  or  smashing  the  new 
machines  that  had  displaced  them  in  the  fac- 
tories. In  the  Tyrol,  sixty  thousand  peasants, 
who  had  revolted  from  the  intolerable  tyranny 
of  the  Bavarians,  were  being  beaten  into  sub- 
mission. In  Servia,  the  Turks  were  striking 
down  a  rebellion  by  building  a  pyramid  of  thirty 
thousand  Servian  skulls, —  a  tragic  pile  which 
may  still  be  seen  midway  between  Belgrade  and 
Stamboul.  Sweden  was  being  trampled  under 
the  feet  of  a  Russian  army;  and  the  greater  part 
of  Holland,  Austria,  Germany,  and  Spain  had 
been  so  scourged  by  the  hosts  of  Napoleon  as 
to  be  one  vast  shamble  of  misery  and  blood. 
In  the  United  States  there  was  no  war,  but 
there  certainly  did  exist  an  abnormal  surplus  of 
adversity.  The  young  republic,  which  had 
fewer  white  citizens  than  the  two  cities  of  New 
York  and  Chicago  possess  to-day,  was  being 
terrorized  in  the  West  by  the  Indian  Confederacy 
of  Tecumseh;  and  its  flag  had  been  flouted  by 
England,  France,  and  the  Barbary  pirates.  Its 
total  revenue  was  much  less  than  the  value  of 

[4] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

last  year's  hay  crop  in  Vermont.  It  was  desper- 
ately poor,  with  its  people  housed  for  the  most 
part  in  log  cabins,  clothed  in  homespun,  and  fed 
every  winter  on  food  that  would  cause  a  riot  in 
any  modern  penitentiary. 

There  was  no  such  thing  known,  except  in 
dreams,  as  the  use  of  machinery  in  the  cultiva- 
tion of  the  soil.  The  average  farmer,  in  all 
civilized  countries,  believed  that  an  iron  plow 
would  poison  the  soil.  He  planted  his  grain  by 
the  phases  of  the  moon;  kept  his  cows  outside  in 
winter;  and  was  unaware  that  glanders  was  con- 
tagious. Joseph  Jenks,  of  Lynn,  had  invented 
the  scythe  in  1655,  "for  the  more  speedy  cutting 
of  grasse";  and  a  Scotchman  had  improved  it 
into  the  grain  cradle.  But  the  greater  part  of 
the  grain  in  all  countries  was,  a  century  ago, 
being  cut  by  the  same  little  hand  sickle  that  the 
Egyptians  had  used  on  the  banks  of  the  Nile 
and  the  Babylonians  in  the  valley  of  the  Eu- 
phrates. 

The  wise  public  men  of  that  day  knew  how 
urgent  was  the  need  of  better  methods  in  farm- 
ing. Fifteen  years  before,  George  Washington 

[5] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

had  said,  "I  know  of  no  pursuit  in  which  more 
real  and  important  service  can  be  rendered  to 
any  country  than  by  improving  its  agriculture." 
But  it  was  generally  believed  that  the  task  was 
hopeless;  and  any  effort  to  encourage  inventors 
had  hitherto  been  a  failure.  An  English  society, 
for  instance,  had  offered  a  prize  of  one  hundred 
and  fifty  dollars  for  a  better  method  of  reaping 
grain,  and  the  only  answer  it  received  was  from 
a  traveller  who  had  seen  the  Belgians  reaping 
with  a  two-foot  scythe  and  a  cane;  the  cane 
was  used  to  push  the  grain  back  before  it  was 
cut,  so  that  more  grain  could  be  cut  at  a  blow. 
As  to  whether  or  not  he  received  the  prize  for 
this  discovery  is  not  recorded. 

The  city  of  New  York  in  1809  was  not  larger 
than  the  Des  Moines  of  to-day,  and  not  nearly  so 
well  built  and  prosperous.  Two  miles  to  the 
north  of  it,  through  swamps  and  forests,  lay  the 
clearing  that  is  now  known  as  Herald  Square. 
There  was  no  street  railway,  nor  cooking  range, 
nor  petroleum,  nor  savings  bank,  nor  friction 
match,  nor  steel  plow,  neither  in  New  York 
nor  anywhere  else.  And  the  one  pride  and 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

boast  of  the  city  was  Fulton's  new  steamboat, 
the  Clermont,  which  could  waddle  to  Albany 
and  back,  if  all  went  well,  in  three  days  or 
possibly  four. 

As  for  social  conditions,  they  were  so  hope- 
lessly bad  that  few  had  the  heart  to  improve 
them.  The  house  that  we  call  a  "slum  tene- 
ment" to-day  would  have  made  an  average 
American  hotel  in  1809.  Rudeness  and  rowdy- 
ism were  the  rule.  Drunkenness  was  as  com- 
mon, and  as  little  considered,  as  smoking  is 
at  the  present  time;  there  was  no  organized 
opposition  to  it  of  any  kind,  except  one  little 
temperance  society  at  Saratoga.  There  were 
no  sewers,  and  much  of  the  water  was  drawn 
from  putrid  wells.  Many  faces  were  pitted 
with  small-pox.  Cholera  and  yellow  jack 
or  strange  hunger-fevers  cut  wide  swaths  of 
death  again  and  again  among  the  helpless  people. 
There  was  no  science,  of  course,  and  no  sanita- 
tion, and  no  medical  knowledge  except  a  medley 
of  drastic  measures  which  were  apt  to  be  as 
dangerous  as  the  disease. 

The   desperate   struggle   to   survive   appears 

[7] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

to  have  been  so  intense  that  there  was  little  or 
no  social  sympathy.  There  was  very  little 
pity  for  the  pauper, —  he  was  auctioned  off  to 
be  half  starved  by  the  lowest  bidder;  and  for 
the  criminal  there  was  no  feeling  except  the 
utmost  repulsion  and  abhorrence.  It  was 
found,  for  instance,  in  1809,  that  in  the  jail 
in  New  York  there  were  seventy-two  women, 
white  and  black,  in  one  chairless,  bedless  room, 
all  kept  in  order  by  a  keeper  with  a  whip,  and 
fed  like  cattle  from  a  tub  of  mush,  some  eating 
with  spoons  and  some  with  cups  and  some  with 
their  unwashed  hands.  And  the  men's  room 
of  that  jail,  says  this  report,  "is  worse  than  the 


women's." 


Also,  in  1809,  the  chronic  quantity  of  misery 
had  been  terribly  augmented  by  the  Embargo, 
—  that  most  ruinous  invention  of  President 
Jefferson,  whereby  American  ships  were  swept 
from  the  sea,  with  a  loss  to  capital  of  twelve 
millions  a  year,  and  a  loss  to  labor  of  thirty 
thousand  places  of  employment.  According 
to  this  amazing  act  of  political  folly,  every 
market-boat  sailing  from  New  Jersey  to  New 

[8] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

York  —  every  sailboat  or  canoe  —  had  to  give 
bail  to  the  federal  government  before  it  dared 
to  leave  the  dock. 

Whatever  flimsy  little  structure  of  industry 
had  been  built  up  in  thirty  years  of  independence, 
was  thrown  prostrate  by  this  Embargo.  A 
hundred  thousand  men  stood  on  the  streets  with 
helpless  hands,  begging  for  work  or  bread. 
The  jails  were  jammed  with  debtors, —  1,300 
in  New  York  alone.  The  newspapers  were 
overrun  by  bankruptcy  notices.  The  coffee- 
houses were  empty.  The  ships  lay  mouldering 
at  the  docks.  In  those  hand-to-mouth  days 
there  was  no  piled-up  reserve  of  food  or  wealth, 
—  no  range  of  towering  wheat-banks  at  every 
port;  and  the  seaboard  cities  lay  for  a  time  as 
desolate  as  though  they  had  been  ravaged  by 
a  pestilence. 

In  that  darkest  year  the  hardscrabble  little 
republic  learned  and  remembered  one  of  its 
most  important  lessons, —  the  fact  that  liberty 
and  independence  are  not  enough.  Here  it 
was,  an  absolutely  free  nation, —  the  only  free 
civilized  country  in  the  world, —  and  yet  as  mis- 

[9] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

erable  and  poor  and  hungry  as  though  it  were  a 
mere  province  of  a  European  empire.  So,  by 
degrees,  there  came  a  change  in  the  American 
point  of  view, —  a  swing  from  politicalism  to 
industrialism.  The  mass  of  the  people  were 
now  surfeited  with  oratory  and  politics  and 
war.  They  began  to  settle  down  to  hard  facts 
and  hard  work.  Instead  of  declaiming  about 
the  rights  of  man,  they  began  to  build  roads 
and  weave  cloth  and  organize  stock  companies. 
Slowly  they  came  to  realize  that  a  second  Revo- 
lution must  be  wrought, —  a  Revolution  that 
would  enable  them  to  write  a  Declaration  of 
Independence  against  Hunger  and  Hardship 
and  Hand  Labor. 

Up  to  the  year  1809  the  chief  topics  of  interest 
in  American  legislatures  and  grocery  stores 
were  the  blockades,  the  Embargo,  the  treaties, 
the  badness  of  Napoleon,  the  blunders  of  Jef- 
ferson, and  the  rudeness  of  England  and  France. 
But  after  that  year  the  chief  topics  of  interest 
came  to  be  of  a  wholly  different  sort.  They 
were  such  as  the  tariff,  the  currency,  the  building 
of  factories  and  canals,  the  opening  of  public 

[10] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

lands,  the  problem  of  slavery,  and  the  develop- 
ment of  the  West.  The  hardy,  victorious  little 
nation  began  to  talk  less  and  work  more;  and 
so  by  a  natural  evolution  of  thought  the  era 
of  George  Washington  and  Thomas  Jefferson 
came  to  an  end,  and  the  era  of  Robert  Fulton 
and  Peter  Cooper  and  Cyrus  Hall  McCormick 
was  in  its  dawn. 

From  1810  to  1820  there  was  a  rush  to  the 
land.  Twenty  million  acres  were  sold,  in  most 
cases  for  two  dollars  an  acre.  Thousands  of 
men  who  had  been  sailors  turned  their  backs 
on  the  sea  and  learned  to  till  the  soil.  Town 
laborers,  too,  whose  wages  had  been  fifty  cents 
a  day,  tramped  westward  along  the  Indian 
trails  and  seized  upon  scraps  of  land  that  lay 
ownerless.  Nine  out  of  ten  Americans  began 
to  farm  with  the  utmost  energy  and  persever- 
ance,—  but  with  what  tools?  With  the  wooden 
plow,  the  sickle,  the  scythe,  and  the  flail,  the 
same  rude  hand-labor  tools  that  the  nations  of 
antiquity  had  tried  to  farm  with, —  the  tools  of 
failure  and  slavery  and  famine. 

Such  was  the  predicament  of  this  republic 
[n] 


CYRUS      HALL     McCORMICK 

for  the  first  seventy-five  years  of  its  life.  It 
could  not  develop  beyond  the  struggle  for  food. 
It  was  chained  to  the  bread-line.  It  could  not 
feed  itself.  Not  even  nine-tenths  of  its  people 
could  produce  enough  grain  to  satisfy  its  hun- 
ger. Again  and  again,  until  1858,  wheat  had 
to  be  imported  by  this  nation  of  farmers.  So, 
as  we  now  look  back  over  those  basic  years, 
from  the  summit  of  the  twentieth  century,  we 
can  see  how  timely  an  event  it  was  that  in  the 
dark  year  1809  the  inventor  of  the  Reaper  was 
born. 


[1* 


I 


CHAPTER  II 

THE   McCORMICK    HOME 

F  we  wish  to  solve  the  riddle  of  the  Reaper, 
—  to  know  why  it  was  not  invented  in  any 
of  the  older  nations  that  rose  to  greatness  and 
perished  in  so  many  instances  for  lack  of  bread, 
—  we  can  find  the  key  to  the  answer  in  the  home 
and  the  ancestry  of  the  McCormicks.  We 
shall  see  that  the  family  into  which  he  was  born 
represented  in  the  highest  degree  that  new 
species  of  farmer, —  self-reliant,  studious,  enter- 
prising, and  inventive, —  which  was  developed 
in  the  pioneer  period  of  American  history. 

Robert  McCormick,  the  father  of  Cyrus,  was 
in  his  most  prosperous  days  the  owner  of  four 
farms,  having  in  all  1,800  acres.  But  his  acres 
were  only  one-half  of  his  interests.  He  owned 
as  well  two  grist-mills,  two  sawmills,  a  smelting- 
furnace,  a  distillery,  and  a  blacksmith-shop. 
He  did  much  more  than  till  the  soil.  He  ham- 
mered iron  and  shaped  wood,  and  did  both  well, 
as  those  can  testify  who  have  seen  an  iron  crane 

[13] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

and  walnut  cabinet  that  were  made  by  his 
hands.  More  than  this,  he  invented  new  types 
of  farm  machinery, —  a  hemp-brake,  a  clover 
huller,  a  bellows,  and  a  threshing-machine. 

The  little  log  workshop  still  stands  where 
Robert  McCormick  and  his  sons  hammered  and 
tinkered  on  rainy  days.  It  is  about  twenty-four 
feet  square,  with  an  uneven  floor,  and  a  heavy 
door  that  was  hung  in  place  by  home-made 
nails  and  home-made  hinges.  There  was  a 
forge  on  either  side  of  the  chir  "  •"•»  that  two 
men  could  work  at  the  same  time;  and  one 
small  rusted  anvil  is  all  that  now  remains  of  its 
equipment. 

As  for  the  McCormick  homestead  itself,  there 
were  so  many  manufacturing  activities  in  it  that 
it  was  literally  half  a  home  and  half  a  factory. 
Shoes  were  cobbled,  cotton,  flax,  and  wool  were 
spun  into  yarn,  woven  into  cloth,  and  fashioned 
into  clothes  for  the  whole  family.  The  stockings 
and  mitts  and  caps  were  all  home-made,  and  so 
was  the  cradle  in  which  the  eight  children  were 
rocked.  What  with  the  moulding  of  candles, 
and  sewing  of  carpet-rags,  and  curing  of  hams, 

[14] 


I  i 


•C  Q 

I'  * 

="  3; 

i'  ^ 

3!  Z 

si  S 

g"  o 

=  PS 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

and  boiling  of  soap,  and  drying  of  herbs,  and 
stringing  of  apples,  the  McCormick  home  was 
practically  a  school  of  many  trades  for  the 
people  who  lived  under  its  roof. 

Robert  McCormick  was  an  educated  man. 
He  was  not  at  all  like  the  poor  serfs  who  tilled 
the  soil  of  Europe.  He  belonged  to  the  same 
general  class  as  those  other  eminent  farmers, — 
Washington,  Jefferson,  Adams,  Webster,  and 
Clay.  He  was  a  reader  of  deep  books  and  a 
student  of  astronomy.  Lawyers  and  clergymen 
would  frequently  drive  to  his  house  to  consult 
with  him.  And  in  mechanical  pursuits  he  had 
an  unusual  degree  of  skill,  having  been  born  the 
son  of  a  weaver  and  accustomed  from  babyhood 
to  the  use  of  machinery. 

He  was  a  gentle,  reflective  man,  with  a  genius 
for  self-reliance  in  any  great  or  little  emergency. 
When  a  new  stone  church  was  built,  and  he 
found  that  his  pew  was  so  dark  that  he  could  not 
see  to  read  the  hymns,  he  promptly  cut  a  small 
window  in  the  wall, —  a  peculiarity  which  is  still 
pointed  out  to  visitors.  On  another  occasion, 
with  this  same  spirit  of  resourcefulness,  he  drove 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

the  spectre  of  yellow  fever  from  the  home.  This 
dreaded  disease  was  gathering  in  a  full  harvest 
in  the  farm-houses  of  the  county.  It  had  cut 
down  three  of  Mrs.  McCormick's  family, —  her 
father,  mother,  and  brother,  —  and  had  swung 
its  fatal  scythe  toward  the  boy  Cyrus,  who  was 
then  five  years  of  age.  When  the  doctor  was 
called,  he  insisted  that  the  child  should  be  bled. 
"But  you  bled  all  the  others,  and  they  died,"  said 
Robert  McCormick  quietly;  "I  '11  have  no  more 
bleedings."  No  remedy  for  yellow  fever,  except 
bleeding,  was  known  to  the  doctors  of  a  century 
ago,  so  Robert  McCormick  at  once  invented 
a  remedy.  He  devised  a  treatment  of  hot  baths, 
hot  teas,  and  bitter  herbs;  and  Cyrus  was  res- 
cued from  the  fever  and  restored  to  perfect 
health. 

Such  a  man  as  Robert  McCormick  would 
have  been  practically  impossible  in  any  other 
country  at  that  time.  There,  in  that  isolated 
hollow  of  the  Virginian  mountains,  he  was  a 
citizen  of  a  free  country.  His  vote  had  helped 
to  make  Thomas  Jefferson  President.  He  was 
a  proprietor,  not  a  serf  nor  a  tenant.  He  was 

[16] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

not  compelled  to  divide  up  every  cord  of  wood 
and  bushel  of  wheat  with  a  king  or  a  landlord. 
Whatever  he  earned  was  his  own.  He  was  an 
American;  and  thus,  in  the  endless  chain  of 
cause  and  effect,  we  can  trace  the  origin  of  the 
Reaper  back,  if  we  wish,  to  George  Washington 
and  Christopher  Columbus. 

The  whole  spirit  of  the  young  republic  pushed 
towards  the  invention  of  labor-saving  machinery, 
—  towards  replacing  the  hoe  with  the  steel 
plow,  the  needle  with  the  sewing-machine,  the 
puddling-furnace  with  the  Bessemer  converter, 
the  sickle  with  the  Reaper.  And  it  is  fair  to 
say  that  the  social  forces  that  represented  the 
American  spirit  were  focused  to  a  remarkable 
degree  in  the  home  in  which  Cyrus  H.  McCor- 
mick  had  his  birth  and  his  education. 

There  was  another  contributing  influence,  too, 
in  the  making  of  McCormick, —  the  fact  that 
the  blood  of  his  father  and  mother  came  to  him 
in  a  pure  strain  of  Scotch-Irish.  It  was  this 
inheritance  that  endowed  him  with  the  tenacity 
and  unconquerable  resiliency  that  enabled  him 
not  only  to  invent  a  new  machine,  but  to  create 

[17] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

a  new  industry  and  hold  fast  to  it  against  all 
comers. 

The  Scotch-Irish!  The  full  story  of  what  the 
United  States  owes  to  this  fire-hardened  race 
has  never  yet  been  told,  —  it  is  a  tale  that  will 
some  day  be  expanded  into  a  fascinating  volume 
of  American  history.  It  is  not  possible  to  under- 
stand either  the  character  or  the  success  of 
McCormick  without  knowing  the  Scotch-Irish 
influences  that  shaped  him. 

The  one  man  who  did  more  to  launch  the 
Scotch-Irish  on  their  conquering  way,  so  it 
appears,  was  John  Knox.  This  preacher- 
statesman,  "who  never  feared  the  face  of  man," 
forced  Queen  Mary  from  her  throne,  and  estab- 
lished self-government  and  a  pure  religion  in 
Scotland,  about  seventy-five  years  after  the  dis- 
covery of  America.  This  brought  English  armies 
down  upon  the  Scotch,  and  for  very  nearly  two 
centuries  the  struggle  was  bitter  and  desperate, 
the  Scotch  refusing  to  compromise  or  to  bate 
one  jot  or  tittle  of  a  covenant  which  many  of 
them  had  signed  with  their  blood. 

At  the  height  of  this  conflict,  about  300,000 

[18] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

of  these  Scotch  Covenanters  left  their  ravaged 
country  and  set  out  in  a  fleet  of  little  vessels  for 
the  north  of  Ireland.  Here  they  settled  in  the 
barren  and  boggy  province  of  Ulster,  and  presto ! 
in  the  course  of  two  generations  Ulster  became 
the  most  prosperous,  moral,  and  intelligent  sec- 
tion of  the  British  empire.  Its  people  were, 
beyond  a  doubt,  the  best  educated  masses  of 
that  period,  either  in  Great  Britain  or  anywhere 
else.  They  were  the  most  skilful  of  farmers. 
They  wove  woollen  cloth  and  the  finest  of  linen. 
They  built  schools  and  churches  and  factories. 
But  in  1698,  the  English  Parliament,  jealous  of 
such  progressiveness,  passed  laws  against  their 
manufacturing,  and  Ulster  was  overrun,  as 
Scotland  had  been,  with  the  police  and  the 
soldiery  of  England. 

The  Scotch-Irish  fought,  of  course,  even 
against  such  odds.  They  had  never  learned 
how  to  submit.  But  as  the  devastation  of  Ulster 
continued,  they  resolved  to  do  as  their  great- 
grandfathers had  done, — emigrate  to  a  new 
country.  They  had  heard  good  reports  of  Amer- 
ica, through  several  of  their  leaders  who  had 

[19] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

been  banished  there  by  the  British  government. 
So  they  packed  up  their  movable  property,  and 
set  out  across  the  wide  uncharted  Atlantic  Ocean 
in  an  exodus  for  liberty  of  industry  and  liberty 
of  conscience. 

By  the  year  1776  there  were  more  than 
500,000  of  the  Scotch-Irish  in  this  country. 
They  went  first  across  the  Alleghanies,  into  the 
new  lands  of  western  Virginia,  Tennessee,  Ken- 
tucky, and  Texas.  Beyond  all  question,  they 
were  the  hardiest  and  ablest  founders  of  the 
republic.  They  dissolved  the  rule  of  the  Cava- 
liers in  Virginia;  and  in  the  little  hamlet  of 
Mecklenburg  they  planned  the  first  defiance  of 
Great  Britain  and  struck  the  key-note  of  the 
Revolution.  They  gave  Washington  thirty-nine 
of  his  generals,  three  out  of  four  members  of 
his  cabinet,  and  three  out  of  five  judges  of  the 
first  Supreme  Court. 

Of  all  classes  of  settlers  in  the  thirteen  colo- 
nies, they  were  the  best  prepared  and  most  will- 
ing for  the  struggle  with  England,  for  the  reason 
that  they  had  begun  to  fight  for  liberty  two 
hundred  and  fifty  years  before  the  battle  of 

[20] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

Bunker  Hill.  They  were  not  amateurs  in  the 
work  of  revolution.  They  were  veterans.  And 
so,  because  they  were  pioneers  and  patriots  by 
nature  and  inheritance,  the  Scotch-Irish  be- 
came, in  the  words  of  John  Fiske,  "the  main 
strength  of  our  American  democracy/' 

Naturally,  they  were  pathfinders  in  industry 
as  well  as  in  the  matter  of  self-government,  as 
many  of  them  had  been  manufacturers  in  Ire- 
land. "Thousands  of  the  best  manufacturers 
and  weavers  in  Ulster  went  to  seek  their  bread 
in  America,"  writes  Froude,  "and  they  carried 
their  art  and  their  tools  with  them."  In  one 
instance,  by  the  failure  of  the  woollen  trade, 
20,000  of  them  were  driven  to  the  United  States. 
As  might  have  been  expected,  these  Scotch- 
Irish  Americans  have  produced  not  only  five 
of  our  Presidents,  but  also  such  merchants  as 
A.  T.  Stewart;  such  publishers  as  Harper,  Bon- 
ner,  Scribner,  and  McClurg ;  and  such  inventors 
as  Joseph  Henry,  Morse,  Fulton,  and  McCor- 
mick.  They  were  possibly  the  first  large  body 
of  people  who  had  ever  been  driven  from  manu- 
facturing into  farming;  and  it  was  not  at  all 

[21] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

surprising,  therefore,  that  the  new  profession 
of  making  farm  machinery  should  have  been 
born  upon  a  Scotch-Irish  farm. 

As  for  Cyrus  H.  McCormick,  he  represented 
the  fourth  generation  of  American  McCormicks. 
His  great-grandfather,  Thomas  McCormick, 
quit  Ulster  in  the  troublous  days  of  1735.  He 
was  a  soldier  at  Londonderry;  and  later  be- 
came noted  as  an  Indian  fighter  in  Pennsyl- 
vania. His  son  Robert,  who  moved  south  to 
Virginia,  carried  a  rifle  for  American  inde- 
pendence at  the  battle  of  Guilford  Court-house, 
North  Carolina,  in  1781.  He  was  a  farmer 
and  weaver  by  occupation,  a  typical  Ulsterman, 
whose  farm  was  a  busy  workshop  of  invention 
and  manufacturing. 

On  his  mother's  side,  too,  Cyrus  McCormick 
had  behind  him  a  line  of  battling  Scotch-Irish. 
She  was  the  daughter  of  a  Virginian  farmer 
named  Patrick  Hall,  one  of  whose  forefathers 
had  been  driven  out  of  Armagh  by  the  massacre 
of  1641.  Patrick  Hall  was  the  leader  of  the  old- 
school  Presbyterians  in  his  region  of  Virginia. 
So  rigid  was  he  in  his  loyalty  to  the  faith  of  the 

[22] 


ROBERT  McCORMICK 


HIS         LIFE        AND         WORK 

Covenanters,  that  once  when  a  new  minister 
came  to  preach  in  the  little  kirk,  and  lined  out 
a  Watts  hymn  instead  of  a  psalm  of  David, 
Patrick  Hall  picked  up  his  hat  and  strode  out, 
followed  by  a  goodly  part  of  the  congregation. 
He  at  once  built  upon  his  own  farm  a  new 
church  of  limestone,  in  which  no  such  levity 
as  hymn-singing  was  permitted. 

Cyrus  McCormick's  mother  inherited  her 
father's  strength  of  character,  without  his  sever- 
ity. She  was  a  thorough  Celt,  impulsive,  free- 
spoken,  and  highly  imaginative.  Judging  from 
the  stories  about  her  that  are  remembered  in 
the  neighborhood,  it  is  evident  that  she  was  a 
woman  of  exceptional  quality  of  mind.  She 
was  not  as  studious  as  her  husband,  but 
quicker  and  more  ambitious.  As  a  girl,  she 
had  been  strikingly  handsome,  with  a  tall 
and  commanding  figure.  She  was  saving  and 
shrewd,  with  the  Scotch-Irish  passion  for  "get- 
ting ahead."  She  allowed  no  idle  moments  in 
the  home.  If  the  children  were  dressed  before 
breakfast  was  ready,  out  they  went  to  cut  wood 
or  weed  the  garden.  She  knew  the  profession 

[23] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

of  housekeeping  in  all  its  old-fashioned  com- 
plexity; and  she  worked  at  it  from  dawn  to 
starlight,  with  no  rest  except  the  relief  of  flitting 
from  one  task  to  another. 

"Mrs.  McCormick  came  riding  by  our  farm 
one  day,"  said  an  aged  neighbor,  "at  a  time 
when  my  father  and  mother  were  hurrying  to 
save  some  hay  from  a  coming  rain-storm.  'If 
you  don't  hurry  up  you  '11  be  too  late/  she  said; 
and  then  tying  her  horse  to  the  fence  she  picked 
up  a  rake  and  helped  with  the  hay  until  it  was 
all  in  the  barn.  That 's  the  kind  of  woman  she 
was, —  always  full  of  energy  and  ready  to  help." 

But  Mrs.  McCormick  was  much  more  than 
industrious.  She  had  a  fine  pride  in  the  owner- 
ship of  beautiful  things, —  flowers  and  hand- 
some clothes  and  silverware  and  mahogany 
furniture.  Her  flock  of  peacocks  was  one  of 
the  sights  of  the  county;  and  in  her  later  life, 
when  she  was  for  ten  years  the  sole  manager  of 
the  farm,  she  was  accustomed  to  drive  about  in 
a  wonderful  carriage  with  folding  steps,  drawn 
by  prancing  horses  and  driven  by  a  stately  -col- 
ored coachman, —  an  equipage  of  so  much 


MRS.   MARY   ANN   HALL  McCORMICK 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

style  and  grandeur  that  it  is  still  remembered 
by  the  neighbors.  "She  loved  to  drive  fast," 
said  one  old  lady;  "and  I  was  much  impressed 
as  a  little  girl  with  the  startling  way  in  which 
her  horses  would  come  clattering  and  dancing 
up  to  the  door." 

Thus  there  was  in  the  McCormick  home  the 
spiritual  and  imaginative  element  that  was 
vital  to  the  development  of  a  man  whose  whole 
life  was  a  battle  against  the  prejudices  and  "im- 
possibilities" of  the  world.  Cyrus  McCormick 
was  predestined,  we  may  legitimately  say,  by 
the  conditions  of  his  birth,  to  accomplish  his 
great  work.  From  his  father  he  had  a  specific 
training  as  an  inventor;  from  his  mother  he 
had  executive  ability  and  ambition;  from  his 
Scotch-Irish  ancestry  he  had  the  dogged  tenacity 
that  defied  defeat;  and  from  the  wheat-fields 
that  environed  his  home  came  the  call  for  the 
Reaper,  to  lighten  the  heavy  drudgery  of  the 
harvest. 


[25] 


CHAPTER  III 

THE  INVENTION  OF  THE  REAPER 

NOT  far  from  the  McCormick  homestead 
was  the  "Old  Field  School,"  built  of  logs 
and  with  a  part  of  one  of  the  upper  logs  cut  out 
to  provide  a  window.  Here  the  boy  Cyrus  sat 
on  a  slab  bench  and  studied  five  books  as 
though  they  were  the  only  books  in  the  world, — 
Murray's  Grammar,  Dilworth's  Arithmetic, 
Webster's  Spelling  Book,  the  Shorter  Cate- 
chism, and  the  Bible. 

He  was  a  strong-limbed,  self-contained,  serious- 
natured  boy,  always  profoundly  intent  upon 
what  he  was  doing.  Even  at  the  age  of  fifteen 
he  was  inventive.  One  winter  morning  he 
brought  to  school  a  most  elaborate  map  of  the 
world,  showing  the  two  hemispheres  side  by  side. 
First  he  had  drawn  it  in  ink  upon  paper,  then 
pasted  the  paper  upon  linen,  and  hung  it  upon 
two  varnished  rollers.  This  map,  which  is  still 
preserved,  reveals  a  remarkable  degree  of  skill 
and  patience;  and  the  fact  that  a  mere  lad 

[*•] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

could  conceive  of  and  create  such  a  map  was 
a  week's  wonder  in  the  little  community.  ;<  That 
boy/'  declared  the  teacher,  "is  beyond  me." 

At  about  this  time  he  undertook  to  do  a  man's 
work  in  the  reaping  of  the  wheat,  and  here  he 
discovered  that  to  swing  a  cradle  against  a  field 
of  grain  under  a  hot  summer  sun  was  of  all 
farming  drudgeries  the  severest.  Both  his  back 
and  his  brain  rebelled  against  it.  One  thing 
at  least  he  could  do, —  he  could  make  a  smaller 
cradle,  that  would  be  easier  to  swing;  and  he 
did  this,  whittling  away  in  the  evening  in  the 
little  log  workshop. 

"Cyrus  was  a  natural  mechanical  genius," 
said  an  old  laborer  who  had  worked  on  the 
McCormick  farm.  "He  was  always  trying  to 
invent  something."  "He  was  a  young  man  of 
great  and  superior  talents,"  said  a  neighbor. 
At  eighteen  he  studied  the  profession  of  survey- 
ing, and  made  a  quadrant  for  his  own  use.  This 
is  still  preserved,  and  bears  witness  to  his  good 
workmanship.  From  this  time  until  his  twenty- 
second  year,  there  is  nothing  of  exceptional 
interest  recorded  of  him.  He  had  grown  to  be 

[27] 


CYRUS      HALL     McCORMICK 

a  tall,  muscular,  dignified  young  man.  The 
neighbors,  in  later  years,  remembered  him 
mainly  because  he  was  so  well  dressed  on 
Sundays,  in  broadcloth  coat  and  beaver  hat, 
and  because  of  his  fine  treble  voice  as  he  led 
the  singing  in  the  country  church. 

Even  as  a  youth  he  was  absorbed  in  his  in- 
ventions and  business  projects.  He  had  no  time 
for  gayeties.  In  a  letter  written  from  Kentucky 
to  a  cousin,  Adam  McChesney,  in  1831,  he  says: 
"Mr.  Hart  has  two  fine  daughters,  right  pretty, 
very  smart,  and  as  rich  probably  as  you  would 
wish;  but  alas!  I  have  other  business  to  attend 
to." 

Ever  since  Cyrus  was  a  child  of  seven,  it 
had  been  the  most  ardent  ambition  of  his  father 
to  invent  a  Reaper.  He  had  made  one  and 
tried  it  in  the  harvest  of  1816,  but  it  was  a  failure. 
It  was  a  fantastic  machine,  pushed  from  behind 
by  two  horses.  A  row  of  short  curved  sickles 
were  fastened  to  upright  posts,  and  the  grain 
was  whirled  against  them  by  revolving  rods. 
It  was  highly  ingenious,  but  the  sinewy  grain 
merely  bunched  and  tangled  around  its  futile 

[23] 


HIS         LIFE        AND         WORK 

sickles;  and  the  poor  old  Reaper  that  would  not 
reap  was  hauled  off  the  field,  to  become  one  of 
the  jokes  of  the  neighborhood. 

This  failure  did  not  dishearten  Robert  Me- 
Cormick.  He  persevered  with  Scotch-Irish  te- 
nacity, but  in  secret.  Hurt  by  the  jests  of  the 
neighbors,  he  worked  thenceforward  with  the 
door  of  his  workshop  locked,  or  at  night.  He 
hid  his  Reaper,  too,  upon  a  shelf  inside  the 
workshop.  "He  allowed  no  one  to  see  what 
he  was  doing,  except  his  sons,"  said  Davis  Mc- 
Cormick,  who  is  now  the  only  living  person  in 
the  neighborhood  with  a  memory  that  extends 
back  to  that  early  period.  *  Yes,"  said  this  lone 
octogenarian,  "Robert  McCormick  was  a  good 
man,  a  true  Christian;  and  he  worked  for 
years  to  make  a  Reaper.  He  always  kept  his 
plans  to  himself,  and  he  told  his  wife  that  if 
visitors  came  to  the  house,  she  should  send  one 
of  the  children  to  fetch  him,  and  not  allow  the 
visitors  to  come  to  his  workshop." 

By  the  early  Summer  of  1831,  Robert  McCor- 
mick had  so  improved  his  Reaper  that  he  gave 
it  a  trial  in  a  field  of  grain.  Again  it  was  a 

im 


CYRUS      HALL     McCORMICK 

failure.  It  did  cut  the  grain  fairly  well,  but 
flung  it  in  a  tangled  heap.  As  much  as  this  had 
been  done  before  by  other  machines,  and  it  was 
not  enough.  To  cut  the  grain  was  only  one- 
half  of  the  problem;  the  other  half  of  the  prob- 
lem, which  up  to  this  time  no  one  had  solved, 
was  how  to  properly  handle  and  deliver  the 
grain  after  it  was  cut. 

By  this  time  Cyrus  had  become  as  much  of  a 
Reaper  enthusiast  as  his  father.  Also,  he  had 
been  studying  out  the  reasons  for  his  father's 
failure,  and  working  out  in  his  mind  a  new  plan 
of  construction.  How  this  new  plan  was  slowly 
moulded  into  shape  by  his  creative  fancy  is  now 
told  for  the  first  time.  A  manuscript,  written 
by  Cyrus  H.  McCormick  himself,  and  which 
has  not  hitherto  been  made  public,  gives  a  com- 
plete description  of  the  process  of  thought  by 
which  he  became  the  inventor  of  the  first  prac- 
tical Reaper.  This  account,  it  may  be  said  in 
explanation,  was  written  by  Mr.  McCormick 
shortly  before  the  Chicago  fire  of  1871.  It 
was  to  be  published  at  that  time,  and  was  in 
type  when  the  fire  came  and  left  not  a  vestige 

[30] 


2     ^v-;-^-      ^rc^~~-p  **•#&*** 

cl^  -Ttz^     <^*      ^     /^    cLz-fcTi,    4**^«jf~?^*-    ' 

^^~^^  y  *       p  /      s 

~t*~-    jfc-^tl^-jS*        «*?-<Z,</e<_--       ^*-     /t-^^t  <7>     r^>   r^^-^r  <•  V'v? 

Tb^ 


FACSIMILES    FROM  MANUSCRIPT   BY    MR.    McCORMICK   GIVING 


US  OWN   ACCOUNT   OK  THE  ORIGIN   OK  THE   REAPER 


v^    °<    ^ 

V    CAvrf- 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

of  the  printery.  The  original  manuscript  was 
preserved;  but  the  labor  of  rebuilding  his  fac- 
tory prevented  him  from  carrying  out  his  original 
design.  He  wholly  forgot  his  authorship  in  the 
troubles  of  his  city;  and  so  his  own  story  of  his 
invention  lay  untouched  among  the  private 
papers  of  the  family  for  thirty-eight  years. 

"Robert  McCormick,"  says  this  document, 
"being  satisfied  that  his  principle  of  operation 
could  not  succeed,  laid  aside  and  abandoned  the 
further  prosecution  of  his  idea."  He  had 
labored  for  fifteen  years  to  make  a  Reaper  that 
would  reap,  and  he  had  failed. 

At  this  point  Cyrus  took  up  the  work  that 
his  father  had  reluctantly  abandoned.  He  had 
never  seen  or  heard  of  any  Reaper  experiments 
except  those  of  his  father;  but  he  believed  he  saw 
a  better  way,  and  "devoted  himself  most  labori- 
ously to  the  discovery  of  a  new  principle  of 
operation." 

He  showed  his  originality  at  the  outset  by 
beginning  where  his  father  and  all  other  Reaper 
inventors  had  left  off, —  with  the  cutting  of  grain 
that  lay  in  a  fallen  and  tangled  mass.  He  faced 

[311 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

the  problem  worst  end  first.  The  Reaper  that 
would  cut  such  grain,  he  believed,  must  first 
separate  the  grain  that  is  to  be  cut  from  the 
grain  that  is  left  standing.  It  must  have  at  the 
end  of  its  knife  a  curved  arm  —  a  divider.  This 
idea  was  simple,  but  in  the  long  history  of  har- 
vesting grain  no  one  had  thought  of  it  before. 
Next,  in  order  to  cut  this  snarled  and  prostrate 
grain  without  missing  any  of  it,  the  knife  must 
have  two  motions :  its  forward  motion,  as  drawn 
by  the  horses,  and  also  a  slashing  sideways  mo- 
tion of  its  own.  How  was  this  to  be  done? 
McCormick's  first  thought  was  to  cut  the  grain 
with  a  whirling  wheel-knife,  but  this  plan  pre- 
sented too  many  new  difficulties.  Suddenly  the 
idea  came  to  him  —  why  not  have  a  straight 
blade,  with  a  back  and  forward  motion  of  its 
own  ?  This  was  the  birth-idea  of  the  reciprocat- 
ing blade,  which  has  been  used  to  this  day  on  all 
grain-cutting  machines.  It  was  not,  like  the 
divider,  a  wholly  new  conception;  but  Cyrus 
McCormick  conceived  it  independently,  and  did 
more  than  any  one  else  to  establish  it  as  the 
basic  feature  of  the  Reaper. 

[*J 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

The  third  problem  was  the  supporting  of  the 
grain  while  it  was  being  cut,  so  that  the  knife 
would  not  merely  flatten  it  to  the  ground.  Mc- 
Cormick  solved  this  by  placing  a  row  of  "fingers 
at  the  edge  of  the  blade.  These  fingers  pro- 
jected a  few  inches,  in  such  a  way  that  the  grain 
was  caught  and  held  in  position  to  be  cut.  The 
shape  of  these  fingers  was  afterwards  much 
improved,  to  prevent  wet  grain  from  clogging 
the  slit  in  which  the  knife  slid  back  and  forth. 

A  fourth  device  was  still  needed  to  lift  up  and 
straighten  the  grain  that  had  fallen.  This  was 
done  by  a  simple  revolving  reel,  such  as  fisher- 
men use  for  the  drying  of  their  nets.  Several  of 
the  abortive  Reapers  that  had  been  tried  else- 
where had  possessed  some  sort  of  a  reel;  but 
McCormick  made  his  much  larger  than  any 
other,  so  that  no  grain  was  too  low  to  escape  it. 

The  fifth  factor  in  this  assembling  of  a  Reaper 
was  the  platform,  to  catch  the  cut  grain  as  it  fell ; 
and  from  which  the  grain  was  to  be  raked  off  by 
a  man  who  walked  alongside  of  it.  The  sixth 
was  the  idea  of  putting  the  shafts  on  the  outside, 
or  stubble  side,  of  the  Reaper,  making  it  a  side- 

[33] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

draught,  instead  of  a  "push"  machine.  And 
the  seventh  and  final  factor  was  the  building  of 
the  whole  Reaper  upon  one  big  driving -wheel, 
which  carried  the  weight  and  operated  the  reel 
and  cutting-blade.  The  grain-side  end  of  the 
blade  was  at  first  supported  by  a  wooden  runner, 
and  later  —  the  following  year — by  a  small 
wheel. 

Such  was  the  making  of  the  first  practical 
Reaper  in  the  history  of  the  world.  It  was  as 
clumsy  as  a  Red  River  ox-cart;  but  it  reaped. 
It  was  made  on  right  lines.  The  "new  princi- 
ple" that  the  youth  McCormick  laboriously  con- 
ceived in  the  little  log  workshop  became  the 
basic  type  of  a  wholly  new  machine.  It  has 
never  been  displaced.  Since  then  there  have 
been  12,000  patents  issued  for  reaper  and  mower 
inventions;  but  not  one  of  them  has  overthrown 
the  type  of  the  first  McCormick  Reaper.  Not 
one  of  the  seven  factors  that  he  assembled  has 
been  thrown  aside;  and  the  most  elaborate  self- 
binder  of  to-day  is  a  direct  descendant  of  the 
crude  machine  that  was  thus  created  by  a  young 
Virginian  farmer  in  1831. 

[34] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

The  young  inventor  toiled  "laboriously,"  he 
says,  to  complete  his  Reaper  in  time  for  the  har- 
vest of  1831.  He  was  very  nearly  too  late,  but 
a  small  patch  of  wheat  was  left  standing  at  his 
request;  and  one  day  in  July,  with  no  specta- 
tors except  his  parents  and  his  excited  brothers 
and  sisters,  Cyrus  put  a  horse  between  the 
shafts  of  his  Reaper,  and  drove  against  the  yel- 
low grain.  The  reel  revolved  and  swept  the 
gentle  wheat  downwards  upon  the  knife.  Click ! 
Click!  Click!  The  white  steel  blade  shot  back 
and  forth.  The  grain  was  cut.  It  fell  upon  the 
platform  in  a  shimmering  golden  swath.  From 
here  it  was  raked  off  by  a  young  laborer  named 
John  Cash.  It  was  a  roughly  done  specimen  of 
reaping,  no  doubt.  The  reel  and  the  divider 
worked  poorly.  But  for  a  preliminary  test  it 
was  a  magnificent  success.  Here,  at  last,  was 
a  Reaper  that  reaped,  the  first  that  had  ever 
been  made  in  any  country. 

The  scene  of  this  first  "reaping  by  horse- 
power" was  then,  and  is  to-day,  one  of  unusual 
beauty.  The  field  is  near  by  the  farm-house, 
rolling  in  several  undulations  to  the  rim  of  a 

[35] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

winding  little  rivulet.  In  the  centre  of  the  field 
is  a  single  tree,  a  wide-branched  white  oak, 
which  was  probably  born  before  the  first  col- 
onists arrived  at  Jamestown.  And  in  the  back- 
ground, not  more  than  two  miles  distant,  rise  the 
tall  and  jagged  crags  of  the  Blue  Ridge,  twelve 
sharp  peaks  flung  high  from  deep  ravines,  on 
which  the  lights  and  shades  are  incessantly 
changing, —  a  most  impressive  staging  for  the 
first  act  of  the  drama  of  the  Reaper. 

This  McCormick  farm,  having  600  acres  of 
land,  is  now  owned  by  the  McCormick  family. 
The  whole  region  has  changed  but  little.  Once, 
and  once  only,  the  great  noisy  outside  world 
surged  into  this  quiet  valley, —  when  a  Union 
army  under  General  Butler  clattered  through  it, 
burning  and  destroying,  and  so  close  to  the  Mc- 
Cormick homestead  that  the  blue  uniforms  could 
be  seen  from  its  front  windows.  Doubtless, 
when  farmers  have  time  to  take  a  proper  pride 
in  the  history  of  their  own  profession,  they  will 
visit  the  McCormick  farm  as  a  spot  of  historic 
interest, —  the  place  where  the  New  Argicul- 
ture  was  born.  It  is  no  longer  a  difficult  place 

[36] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

to  reach,  as  it  is  now  possible  to  lunch  to-day 
in  either  Chicago  or  New  York  and  to-morrow 
in  the  same  comfortable  red  brick  farm-house 
that  sheltered  the  McCormicks  in  1831. 

Several  days  after  the  advent  of  the  Reaper 
on  the  home  farm,  Cyrus  McCormick  had  im- 
proved its  reel  and  divider,  and  was  ready  for  a 
public  exhibition  at  the  near-by  village  of  Steele's 
Tavern.  Here,  with  two  horses,  he  cut  six  acres 
of  oats  in  an  afternoon,  a  feat  which  was  at- 
tested in  court  in  1848  by  his  brothers  William 
and  Leander,  and  also  by  three  of  the  villagers, 
John  Steele,  Eliza  Steele,  and  Dr.  N.  M.  Hitt. 
Such  a  thing  at  that  time  was  incredible.  It  was 
equal  to  the  work  of  six  laborers  with  scythes, 
or  twenty-four  peasants  with  sickles.  It  was 
as  marvellous  as  though  a  man  should  walk 
down  the  street  carrying  a  dray-horse  on  his 
back. 

The  next  year,  1832,  Cyrus  McCormick  came 
out  with  his  Reaper  into  what  seemed  to  him 
"  the  wide,  wide  world."  He  gave  a  public  exhi- 
bition near  the  little  town  of  Lexington,  which 
lay  eighteen  miles  south  of  the  farm.  Fully  one 

[37] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

hundred  people  were  present  —  several  politi- 
cal leaders  of  local  fame,  farmers,  professors, 
laborers,  and  a  group  of  negroes  who  frolicked 
and  shouted  in  uncomprehending  joy. 

At  the  start,  it  appeared  as  though  this  new 
contraption  of  a  machine,  which  was  unlike  any- 
thing else  that  human  eyes  had  ever  seen,  was 
to  prove  a  grotesque  failure.  The  field  was 
hilly,  and  the  Reaper  jolted  and  slewed  so  vio- 
lently that  John  Ruff,  the  owner  of  the  field, 
made  a  loud  protest. 

"Here!  This  won't  do,"  he  shouted.  "Stop 
your  horses.  You  are  rattling  the  heads  off  my 
wheat." 

This  was  a  hard  blow  to  the  young  farmer- 
inventor.  Several  laborers,  who  were  openly 
hostile  to  the  machine  as  their  rival  in  the  labor 
market,  began  to  jeer  with  great  satisfaction. 
"It's  a  humbug,"  said  one.  "Give  me  the  old 
cradle  yet,  boys,"  said  another.  These  men 
wrere  hardened  and  bent  and  calloused  with  the 
drudgery  of  harvesting.  They  worked  twelve 
and  fourteen  hours  a  day  for  less  than  a  nickel 
an  hour.  But  they  were  as  resentful  toward 

[38] 

f 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

a  Reaper  as  the  drivers  of  stage-coaches  were  to 
railroads,  or  as  the  hackmen  of  to-day  are 
towards  automobiles. 

At  this  moment  of  apparent  defeat,  a  man 
of  striking  appearance,  who  had  been  watching 
the  floundering  of  the  Reaper  with  great  inter- 
est, came  to  the  rescue. 

"I  '11  give  you  a  fair  chance,  young  man,"  he 
said.  "That  field  of  wheat  on  the  other  side  of 
the  fence  belongs  to  me.  Pull  down  the  fence 
and  cross  over." 

This  friend  in  need  was  the  Honorable  Wil- 
liam Taylor,  who  was  several  years  later  a  can- 
didate for  the  governorship  of  Virginia.  His 
offer  was  at  once  accepted  by  Cyrus  McCor- 
mick,  and  as  the  second  field  was  fairly  level, 
he  laid  low  six  acres  of  wheat  before  sundown. 
This  was  no  more  than  he  had  done  in  1831,  but 
on  this  occasion  he  had  conquered  a  larger  and 
more  incredulous  audience. 

After  the  sixth  acre  was  cut,  the  Reaper  was 
driven  with  great  acclaim  into  the  town  of  Lex- 
ington and  placed  on  view  in  the  court-house 
square.  Here  it  was  carefully  studied  by  a 

[39] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

Professor  Bradshaw  of  the  Lexington  Female 
Academy,  who  finally  announced  in  a  loud  and 
emphatic  voice,  "'This  —  machine  —  is  worth 
—  a  hundred  —  thousand  —  dollars."  This 
praise,  from  "a  scholar  and  a  gentleman,"  as 
McCormick  afterwards  called  him,  T  as  very 
encouraging.  And  still  more  so  was  the  quiet 
word  of  praise  from  Robert  McCormick,  who 
said,  "It  makes  me  feel  proud  to  have  a  son  do 
what  I  could  not  do." 

Of  all  who  were  present  on  that  memorable 
summer  day,  not  one  is  now  alive.  Neither  in 
Lexington  nor  in  Staunton  —  the  towns  that 
lay  on  either  side  of  the  McCormick  farm  — 
can  we  find  any  one  who  saw  the  Reapers  of 
1831  and  1832.  But  among  those  who  testi- 
fied at  various  lawsuits  that  they  had  seen  the 
Lexington  Reaper  operate  were  Colonel  James 
McDowell,  Colonel  John  Bowyer,  Colonel  Sam- 
uel Reed,  Colonel  A.  T.  Barclay,  Dr.  Taylor, 
William  Taylor.  John  Ruff,  John  W.  Hough- 
awout,  John  Steele,  James  Moore,  and  Andrew 
Wallace.  There  was  an  old  lady,  also,  in  1885, 
Miss  Polly  Carson,  who  told  how  she  had  seen 

[40] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

the  Reaper  hauled  along  the  road  by  two  horses, 
which,  she  said,  "had  to  be  led  by  a  couple  of 
darkies,  because  they  were  scared  to  death  by 
the  racket  of  the  machine."  And  she  expressed 
the  general  unbelief  of  that  day,  very  likely,  by 
saying,  "I  thought  it  was  a  right  smart  curious 
sort  of  a  thing,  but  that  it  wouldn't  come  to 
much." 

Cyrus  McCormick  was  far  from  being  the  first 
to  secure  a  Reaper  patent.  He  was  the  forty- 
seventh.  Twenty-three  others  in  Europe  and 
twenty-three  in  the  United  States  had  invented 
machines  of  varying  inefficiency;  but  there  was 
not  one  of  these  which  could  have  been  im- 
proved into  the  proper  shape.  Without  any 
exception,  the  rival  manufacturers  who  rose  up 
in  later  years  to  fight  McCormick  did  him  the 
homage  of  copying  his  Reaper;  and  certainly 
none  of  them  attempted  to  offer  for  sale  any  type 
of  machine  that  was  invented  prior  to  1831. 

A  careful  study  of  the  pre-McCormick  Reapers 
reveals  one  fault  common  to  all, —  they  were 
made  by  theorists,  to  cut  ideal  grain  in  ideal 
fields.  Some  of  them,  if  grain  always  grew 

[41] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMlCK 

straight  and  was  perfectly  willing  to  be  cut, 
might  have  been  fairly  useful.  They  assuredly 
might  have  succeeded  if  grain  grew  in  a  parlor. 
But  to  cut  actual  grain  in  actual  fields  was  an- 
other matter,  and  quite  beyond  their  power. 
None  of  them,  apparently,  knew  the  funda- 
mental difference  between  a  Reaper  and  a 
mower.  They  did  not  observe  that  grain  is  easy 
to  cut  but  hard  to  handle,  while  grass  is  hard  to 
cut  and  easy  to  handle;  and  they  persisted  in 
the  assumption  that  grain  could  be  reaped  by 
a  mower. 

These  inventors  who  failed,  but  who  doubtless 
blazed  the  way  by  their  failures  to  the  final  suc- 
cess of  McCormick,  were  not,  as  he  was,  a  prac- 
tical farmer  on  rough  and  hilly  ground.  One 
was  a  clergyman,  who  devised  a  six- wheel 
chariot,  with  many  pairs  of  scissors,  and  which 
was  to  be  pushed  by  horses  and  steered  by  a 
rudder  that  in  rough  ground  would  jerk  a  man's 
arm  out  of  joint.  A  second  of  these  inventors 
was  a  sailor,  who  experimented  with  a  few 
stalks  of  straight  grain  stuck  in  gimlet  holes  in 
his  workshop  floor.  A  third  was  an  actor, 

[4*] 


INTERIOR  OF  BLACKSMITH   SHOP  IN   WHICH   C.   H.   McCORMICK   BUILT   HIS 

FIRST  REAPER 


- 

•  *£-<  - 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

who  had  built  a  Reaper  that  would  cut  artificial 
grain  on  the  stage.  A  fourth  was  a  school- 
teacher, a  fifth  a  machinist,  and  so  on.  In  no 
instance  can  we  find  that  any  one  of  these 
pre-McCormick  inventors  was  a  farmer,  who 
therefore  knew  what  practical  difficulties  had 
to  be  overcome. 

The  farmers,  on  the  other  hand,  thought 
first  of  these  difficulties  and  scoffed  at  the  parlor 
inventors.  The  editor  of  the  "Farmer's  Reg- 
ister" spoke  the  opinion  of  most  farmers  of  that 
time  when  he  said  that  "an  insurmountable 
difficulty  will  sometimes  be  found  to  the  use  of 
reaping-machines  in  the  state  of  the  growing 
crops,  which  may  be  twisted  and  laid  flat  in 
every  possible  direction.  A  whole  crop  may  be 
ravelled  and  beaten  down  by  high  winds  and 
heavy  rains  in  a  single  day." 

One  of  the  basic  reasons,  therefore,  for  the 
success  of  Cyrus  McCormick  was  the  fact  that 
he  was  not  a  parlor  inventor.  He  was  primarily 
a  farmer.  He  knew  what  wheat  was  and  how  it 
grew.  And  his  first  aim  in  making  a  reaper  was 
not  to  produce  a  mechanical  curiosity,  nor  to 

[43] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

derive  a  fortune  from  the  sale  of  his  patent,  but 
to  cut  the  grain  on  his  father's  farm. 

So  far  as  the  pre-McCormick  inventors  are 
concerned,  the  whole  truth  about  them  seems 
to  be  that  a  few  invented  fractional  mowers  or 
reapers  that  were  fairly  good  as  far  as  they  went, 
and  that  most  of  them  invented  nothing  that 
became  of  any  lasting  value.  Nine-tenths  of 
them  were  pathfinders  in  the  sense  that  they 
showed  what  ought  not  to  be  done. 

Very  little  attention  would  have  been  given 
them  had  it  not  been  for  the  persistent  effort 
made  by  rival  manufacturers  to  detract  from 
McCormick's  reputation  as  an  inventor.  This 
they  did  in  a  wholly  impersonal  manner,  of 
course,  so  that  they  should  not  be  obliged  to  pay 
him  royalties,  and  because  his  prestige  as  the 
original  inventor  of  the  Reaper  enabled  him  to 
outsell  them  among  the  farmers. 

But  now  that  the  competition  of  Reaper  man- 
ufacturers has  been  tempered  by  consolidation, 
the  time  has  arrived  to  do  justice  to  Cyrus  Mc- 
Cormick  as  the  inventor  of  the  Reaper.  The 
stock  phrase, —  "He  was  less  of  an  inventor 

[441 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

than  a  business  man,"  which  was  so  widely  used 
against  him  during  his  lifetime,  ought  now  in 
all  fairness  to  be  laid  aside.  The  fact  is,  as  we 
have  seen,  that  he  was  schooled  as  a  boy  into 
an  inventive  habit  of  mind;  and  that  before  his 
invention  of  the  Reaper,  he  had  devised  a  new 
grain-cradle,  a  hillside  plow,  and  a  self-sharpen- 
ing plow.  There  is  abundant  corroborative 
evidence  in  the  letters  which  he  wrote  to  his 
father  and  brothers,  instructing  them  to  "make 
the  divider  and  wheel  post  longer,"  to  "put 
the  crank  one  inch  farther  back,"  and  so  forth. 
Also,  in  the  will  of  Robert  McCormick,  there  is 
a  clause  authorizing  the  executor  to  pay  a  royalty 
to  Cyrus  of  fifteen  dollars  apiece  on  whatever 
machines  were  sold  by  the  family  during  that 
season,  showing  that  the  father,  who  of  all  men 
was  in  the  best  position  to  know,  regarded  Cyrus 
as  the  inventor. 

Of  all  the  manufacturers  who  fought  Mc- 
Cormick in  the  patent  suits  of  early  days,  three 
only  have  survived  to  see  the  passing  of  the  Mc- 
Cormick Centenary  —  Ralph  Emerson,  C.  W. 
Marsh,  and  William  N.  Whiteley.  In  response 

[45] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

to  a  question  as  to  Cyrus  McCormick's  place  as 
an  inventor,  Mr.  Whiteley  said:  "McCormick 
invented  the  divider  and  the  practical  reel;  and 
he  was  the  first  man  to  make  the  Reaper  a  suc- 
cess in  the  field."  Mr.  Marsh  said:  "He  was  a 
meritorious  inventor,  although  he  combined 
the  ideas  of  other  men  with  his  own;  and  he 
produced  the  first  practical  side-delivery  ma- 
chine in  the  market."  And  Mr.  Emerson  said: 
'The  enemies  of  Cyrus  H.  McCormick  have 
said  that  he  was  not  an  inventor,  but  I  say 
that  he  was  an  inventor  of  eminence." 

Thus  it  appears  that  the  invention  of  the 
Reaper  was  not  in  any  sense  unique;  it  came 
about  by  an  evolutionary  process  such  as  pro- 
duced all  other  great  discoveries  and  inventions. 
First  come  the  dreamers,  the  theorists,  the 
heroic  innovators  who  awaken  the  world's  brain 
upon  a  new  line  of  thought.  Then  come  the 
pioneers  who  solve  certain  parts  of  the  problem 
and  make  suggestions  that  are  of  practical  value. 
And  then,  in  the  fulness  of  time,  comes  one 
masterful  man  who  is  more  of  a  doer  than 
a  dreamer,  who  works  out  the  exact  combi- 

[46] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

nation  of  ideas  to  produce  the  result,  and 
establishes  the  new  product  as  a  necessary 
part  of  the  equipment  of  the  whole  human 
family. 

Cyrus  Hall  McCormick  invented  the  Reaper. 
He  did  more  —  he  invented  the  business  of 
making  Reapers  and  selling  them  to  the  farmers 
of  America  and  foreign  countries.  He  held 
preeminence  in  this  line,  with  scarcely  a  break, 
until  his  death;  and  the  manufacturing  plant 
that  he  founded  is  to-day  the  largest  of  its  kind. 
Thus,  it  is  no  more  than  an  exact  statement 
of  the  truth  to  say  that  he  did  more  than  any 
other  member  of  the  human  race  to  abolish  the 
famine  of  the  cities  and  the  drudgery  of  the 
farih  —  to  feed  the  hungry  and  straighten  the 
bent  backs  of  the  world. 


47] 


I 


CHAPTER  IV 

SIXTEEN  YEARS  OF  PIONEERING 
N  1831  Cyrus  McCormick  had  his  Reaper, 
but  the  great  world  knew  nothing  of  it. 
None  of  the  850  papers  that  were  being  printed 
at  this  time  in  the  United  States  had  given  the 
notice  of  its  birth.  There  was  the  young  in- 
ventor, with  the  one  machine  that  the  human 
race  most  needed,  in  a  remote  cleft  of  the  Vir- 
ginian mountains,  four  days'  journey  from  Rich- 
mond, and  wholly  without  any  experience  or 
money  or  influence  that  would  enable  him  to 
announce  what  he  had  done. 

He  had  such  a  problem  to  solve  as  no  inventor 
of  to-day  or  to-morrow  can  have.  He  was  not 
living,  as  we  are,  in  an  age  of  faith  and  optimism 
—  when  every  new  invention  is  welcomed  with 
a  shout  of  joy.  He  confronted  a  sceptical  and 
slow-moving  little  world,  so  different  from  that 
of  to-day  that  it  requires  a  few  lines  of  portrayal. 
In  general,  it  was  a  non-inventive  and  hand- 
labor  world.  There  were  few  factories,  except 

[48] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

for  the  weaving  of  cotton  and  woollen  cloth. 
There  was  no  sewing-machine,  nor  Bessemer 
converter,  nor  Hoe  press,  nor  telegraph,  nor 
photography.  It  was  still  the  age  of  the  tallow 
candle  and  stage-coach  and  tinder-box.  Prac- 
tically no  such  thing  was  known  as  farm  machin- 
ery. Jethro  Wood  had  invented  his  iron  plow, 
but  he  was  at  this  time  dying  in  poverty,  never 
having  been  able  to  persuade  farmers  to  abandon 
their  plows  of  wood.  As  for  steel  plows,  no 
one  in  any  country  had  conceived  of  such  a 
thing.  James  Oliver  was  a  bare-footed  school- 
boy in  Scotland  and  John  Deere  was  a  young 
blacksmith  in  Vermont.  Plows  were  pulled 
by  oxen  and  horses,  not  by  slaves,  as  in  certain 
regions  of  Asia;  but  almost  every  other  sort  of 
farm  work  was  done  by  hand. 

Railways  were  few  and  of  little  account. 
Eighty-two  miles  of  flimsy  track  had  been  built 
in  the  United  States;  the  Baltimore  and  Ohio 
was  making  a  solemn  experiment  with  loco- 
motives, horses,  and  sails,  to  ascertain  which 
one  of  these  three  was  the  best  method  of  propul- 
sion. The  first  really  successful  American  loco- 

[49]- 


CYRUS      HALL     McCORMICK 

motive  was  put  on  the  rails  in  this  year;  and 
Professor  Joseph  Henry  set  up  his  trial  telegraph 
wire  and  gave  the  electric  current  its  first  lesson 
in  obedience. 

There  was  no  free  library  in  the  world  in  1831. 
The  first  one  was  started  in  Peterborough,  N.  H., 
two  years  later.  In  England,  electoral  reform 
had  not  begun,  a  General  Fast  had  been  ordered 
because  of  the  prevalence  of  cholera,  and  a  four- 
pound  loaf  cost  more  than  the  day's  pay  of  a 
laborer.  The  United  States  was  a  twenty-four- 
State  republic,  with  very  little  knowledge  of 
two- thirds  of  its  own  territory.  The  source  of 
the  Mississippi  River,  for  instance,  was  un- 
known. To  send  a  letter  from  Boston  to  New 
York  cost  the  price  of  half  a  bushel  of  wheat. 
There  was  no  newspaper  in  Wisconsin  and  no 
house  in  Iowa.  The  first  sale  of  lots  was  an- 
nounced in  Chicago,  but  there  was  then  no  public 
building  in  that  hamlet,  nothing  but  a  few  log 
cabins  in  a  swampy  waste  that  was  populous 
only  in  wild  ducks,  bears,  and  wolves.  Forty 
of  the  latter  were  shot  by  the  villagers  in  1834. 

Of  the  many  eminent  men  who  had  the  same 

[50] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

birth-year  as  McCormick,  Poe  and  Mendelssohn 
had  begun  to  be  known  as  men  of  genius  in 
1831.  But  Lincoln  was  then  "a  sort  of  clerk" 
in  a  village  store.  Darwin  was  setting  out  on 
H.  M.  S.  Beagle  upon  his  first  voyage  as  a 
naturalist.  Gladstone  was  a  student  at  Oxford. 
Proudhon  was  working  at  the  case  as  a  poor 
printer.  Oliver  Wendell  Holmes  was  somewhat 
aimlessly  studying  law.  Chopin  was  on  his  way 
to  Paris.  Tennyson  had  left  college,  without  a 
degree,  to  devote  his  life  to  the  service  of  poetry. 
Three  great  men  who  had  been  born  earlier, 
Garrison,  Whittier,  and  Mazzini,  began  their 
life-work  in  1831.  And  science  was  a  babe  in 
the  cradle.  Herbert  Spencer,  Virchow  and  Pas- 
teur were  learning  the  multiplication  table. 
Huxley  was  six  and  Bertheiot  four. 

There  was  no  Kansas,  Minnesota,  Nebraska, 
California,  nor  Texas.  Virginia  was  the  main 
wheat  State.  Local  famines  were  of  yearly 
occurrence.  The  period  between  1816  and  1820 
had  been  one  of  severe  depression  and  was 
bitterly  referred  to  as  the  "  1800-and-starve-to- 
death"  period.  Seventy-five  thousand  people 

[51] 


CYRUS      HALL     McCORMICK 

had  been  imprisoned  for  debt  in  New  York  in  a 
single  year,  and  a  workingmen's  party  had 
sprung  up  as  a  protest  against  such  intolerable 
conditions.  Even  as  late  as  1837  there  was  a 
bread  riot  in  the  city  of  New  York.  Five  thou- 
sand hungry  rioters  broke  into  the  warehouse 
of  Eli  Hart  &  Company,  and  destroyed  a  great 
quantity  of  flour  and  wheat.  Five  hundred 
barrels  of  flour  were  thrown  from  the  windows; 
and  women  and  children  gathered  it  up  greedily 
from  the  dirty  gutter  where  it  fell. 

So  the  world  that  confronted  Cyrus  McCor- 
mick  was  not  a  friendly  world  of  science  and 
invention  and  prosperity.  It  was  slow  and  dull 
and  largely  hostile  to  whoever  would  teach  it  a 
better  way  of  working.  And  we  shall  now  see 
by  what  means  McCormick  compelled  it  to 
accept  his  Reaper,  and  to  give  him  the  credit  and 
pay  for  his  invention. 

He  was  resolved  from  the  first  not  to  be  robbed 
and  flung  aside  as  most  inventors  had  been. 
Whitney,  the  inventor  of  the  cotton-gin,  had 
said  in  1812:  "The  whole  amount  I  have  re- 
ceived is  not  equal  to  the  value  of  the  labor  saved 

[52] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

in  one  hour  by  my  machines  now  in  use."  Fulton 
had  died  at  fifty,  plagued  and  plundered  by 
imitators.  Kay,  Jacquard,  Heathcoat,  and  Har- 
greaves,  inventors  of  weaving  machinery,  were 
mobbed.  Arkwright's  mill  was  burned  by  in- 
cendiaries. Gutenberg,  Cort,  and  Jethro  Wood 
lost  their  fortunes.  Palissy  was  thrown  into  the 
Bastile.  And  Goodyear,  who  gave  us  rubber, 
Bottgher,  who  gave  us  Sevres  porcelain,  and 
Sauvage,  who  gave  us  the  screw  propeller,  died 
in  poverty  and  neglect. 

But  Cyrus  McCormick  was  more  than  an 
inventor.  He  was  a  business-builder.  In  the 
same  resolute,  deliberate  way  in  which  he  had 
made  his  Reaper,  he  now  set  to  work  to  make  a 
business.  He  planned  and  figured  and  made 
experiments.  "  His  whole  soul  was  wrapped  up 
in  his  Reaper,"  said  one  of  the  neighbors.  Once 
while  riding  home  on  horseback  in  the  Summer 
of  1832,  his  horse  stopped  to  drink  in  the  centre 
of  a  stream,  and  as  he  looked  out  upon  the  fields 
of  yellow  grain,  shimmering  in  the  sunlight,  the 
dazzling  thought  flashed  upon  his  brain,  "Per- 
haps I  may  make  a  million  dollars  from  this 

[53] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

Reaper."  As  he  said  in  a  letter  written  in  later 
years:  "This  thought  was  so  enormous  that  it 
seemed  like  a  dream-like  dwelling  in  the  clouds 

—  so  remote,  so  unattainable,    so  exalted,    so 
visionary." 

His  first  step  was  seemingly  a  mistake,  though 
it  must  have  contributed  much  toward  the 
development  of  self-reliance  and  hardihood  in 
his  own  character.  He  received  a  tract  of  land 
from  his  father,  and  proceeded  with  might  and 
main  to  farm  it  alone.  There  was  a  small  log 
house  on  his  land,  and  here  he  lived  with  two 
aged  negro  servants  and  his  Reaper. 

He  needed  money  to  buy  iron  —  to  advertise 

—  to  appoint  agents.     And  he  had  no  means 
of  earning  money  except  by  farming. 

It  is  very  evident  that  he  had  not  set  aside 
his  purpose  to  make  Reapers,  for  we  find  in 
the  Lexington  Union  of  September  28,  1833, 
the  first  advertisement  of  his  machine.  He 
offers  Reapers  for  sale  at  $50.00  apiece,  and 
gives  four  testimonials  from  farmers.  But  noth- 
ing came  of  this  advertisement.  No  farmer  came 


[54] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

forward  to  buy.  The  four  men  who  had  given 
testimonials  had  only  seen  the  Reaper  at  work. 
They  were  not  purchasers.  McCormick  was  "a 
voice  crying  in  the  wilderness"  for  nine  years 
before  he  found  a  farmer  who  had  the  money 
and  the  courage  to  buy  one  of  his  Reapers. 

After  living  for  more  than  a  year  on  his  farm, 
McCormick  saw  that  as  a  means  of  raising 
money  it  was  a  failure.  It  had  given  him  a  most 
valuable  period  of  preparatory  solitude,  but  it 
had  not  helped  him  to  launch  the  Reaper;  so 
he  looked  about  him  for  some  enterprise  that 
would  yield  a  larger  profit.  There  was  a  large 
deposit  of  iron  ore  near  by,  and  he  resolved  to 
build  a  furnace  and  make  iron.  Iron  was  the 
most  expensive  item  in  the  making  of  a  reaper. 
At  that  time  it  was  $50.00  a  ton  —  two  and  a 
half  cents  a  pound.  So  as  he  had  been  unable 
to  establish  the  Reaper  business  with  a  farm, 
he  now  set  out  to  do  it  with  a  furnace.  He  per- 
suaded his  father  and  the  school  teacher  to  be- 
come his  partners;  and  they  built  the  furnace 
and  were  making  their  first  iron  in  1835  —  the 


CYRUS      HALL     McCORMICK 

same  year,  by  the  way,  in  which  a  babe  named 
Andrew  Carnegie  was  born  in  the  little  Scotch 
town  of  Dunfermline. 

For  several  years  the  furnace  did  fairly  well. 
It  swallowed  the  ore  and  charcoal  and  limestone, 
and  poured  into  the  channelled  sand  little  sput- 
tering streams  of  fiery  metal.  Cyrus  made  the 
patterns  for  the  moulds,  and,  because  of  his 
great  strength,  did  much  of  the  heaviest  labor. 
But  the  work  was  so  incessant  that  he  had  no 
time  to  build  Reapers.  And  in  1839,  when  the 
effects  of  the  1837  panic  were  felt  in  the  more 
remote  regions  of  Virginia,  Cyrus  McCormick 
realized  to  the  full  the  aptness  of  that  couplet 
of  Hudibras  - 

"Ah,  me,  the  perils  that  environ 
The  man  who  meddles  with  cold  iron!  " 

The  price  of  iron  fell;  debtors  were  unable 
to  pay;  the  school  teacher  signed  over  his  prop- 
erty to  his  mother;  and  the  whole  burden  of 
the  inevitable  bankruptcy  fell  upon  the  McCor- 
micks.  Cyrus  gave  up  his  farm  to  the  creditors, 
and  whatever  other  property  he  had  that  was 
saleable.  He  did  not  give  up  the  Reaper,  and 

[56] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

nobody  would  have  taken  it  if  he  had.  Thus 
far,  he  had  made  no  progress  towards  the  build- 
ing of  a  Reaper  business.  Instead  of  being  the 
owner  of  a  million,  or  any  part  of  a  million,  he 
was  eight  years  older  than  when  he  had  begun 
to  seek  his  fortune,  and  penniless. 

In  this  hour  of  debt  and  defeat  Cyrus  be- 
came the  leader  of  the  family.  Here  for  the 
first  time  he  showed  that  indomitable  spirit 
which  was,  more  than  any  other  one  thing,  the 
secret  of  his  success.  At  once  he  did  what  he 
had  not  felt  was  possible  before  —  he  began 
to  make  Reapers.  Without  money,  without 
credit,  without  customers,  he  founded  the  first 
of  the  world's  reaper  factories  in  the  little  log 
workshop  near  his  father's  house.  In  the  year 
of  the  iron  failure,  1839,  he  gave  a  public  exhi- 
bition on  the  farm  of  Joshua  Smith,  near  the 
town  of  Staunton.  With  two  men  and  a  team 
of  horses  he  cut  two  acres  of  wheat  an  hour. 
At  this  there  was  great  applause,  but  no  buyers. 

The  farmers  of  that  day  were  not  accustomed 
to  the  use  of  machinery.  Their  farm  tools,  for 
the  most  part,  were  so  simple  as  to  be  made 

[57] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

either  by  themselves  or  by  the  village  black- 
smith. That  the  Reaper  did  the  work  of  ten 
men,  they  could  not  deny.  But  it  was  driven 
by  an  expert.  "It's  all  very  wonderful,  but 
I  'm  running  a  farm,  not  a  circus,"  thought 
the  average  spectator  at  these  exhibitions. 
Also,  there  was  in  all  Eastern  States  at  that 
time  a  surplus  of  labor  and  a  scarcity  of  money, 
both  of  which  tended  to  retard  the  adoption  of 
the  Reaper. 

Neither  did  the  business  men  of  Staunton  pay 
any  serious  attention  to  it.  There  was  a  Sam- 
son Eager  at  that  time  who  made  wagons,  a 
David  Gilkerson  who  made  furniture,  a  Jacob 
Kurtz  who  made  spinning  wheels,  and  an 
Absalom  Brooks  who  made  harness.  But  none 
of  these  men  saw  any  fortune  in  the  making  of 
Reapers,  and  Staunton  lost  its  great  opportunity 
to  be  a  manufacturing  centre. 

Failure  was  being  heaped  on  failure,  yet 
Cyrus  McCormick  hung  to  his  Reaper  as  John 
Knox  had  to  his  Bible.  He  went  back  to  the 
little  log  workshop  with  a  fighting  hope  in  his 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

heart,  and  hammered  away  to  make  a  still 
better  machine. 

This  was  the  darkest  period  in  the  history  of 
the  McCormicks  —  from  1837  to  1840.  Once 
a  constable  named  John  Newton  rode  up  to  the 
farm-house  door  with  a  summons,  calling  Cyrus 
and  his  father  before  the  County  Judge  on 
account  of  a  debt  of  $19.01.  A  teamster  named 
John  Brains  had  brought  suit.  His  bill  had 
been  $72.00  and  he  had  been  paid  more  than 
three-fourths  of  the  money.  But  the  constable 
was  so  impressed  with  the  honesty  and  industry 
of  the  McCormicks,  that  he  rode  back  to  town 
without  having  served  the  summons.  A  little 
later,  Mr.  John  Brains  received  his  money; 
and  it  may  be  said  that  had  he  accepted,  in- 
stead, a  five  per  cent  interest  in  the  Reaper,  he 
would  have  become  in  twenty  years  or  less  one 
of  the  richest  men  in  the  county. 

As  it  happened,  not  one  of  Cyrus  McCor- 
mick's  creditors  thought  of  such  an  idea  as 
seizing  the  Reaper,  or  the  patent,  which  had 
been  secured  in  1834.  If  the  queer-looking 


[59] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

machine,  which  was  regarded  as  part  marvel 
and  part  freak,  had  been  put  up  to  auction 
in  that  neighborhood  of  farmers,  very  likely 
it  would  have  found  no  bidders.  There 
appeared  to  be  one  man  only,  a  William 
Massie,  who  appreciated  the  ability  of  Cyrus 
McCormick  and  lent  him  sums  of  money  on 
various  urgent  occasions. 

But  in  1840  a  stranger  rode  from  the  north 
and  drew  rein  in  front  of  the  little  log  workshop. 
In  appearance  he  was  a  rough-looking  man,  but 
to  Cyrus  he  was  an  angel  of  light.  He  had 
come  to  buy  a  Reaper.  He  had  been  one  of  the 
spectators  at  the  Staunton  exhibition,  and  he 
had  resolved  to  risk  $50  on  one  of  the  new 
machines.  His  name,  which  deserves  to  be 
recorded  in  the  annals  of  the  Reaper,  was 
Abraham  Smith. 

Several  weeks  later  came  two  other  angels  in 
disguise  —  farmers  who  had  heard  of  the  Reaper 
and  who  had  ridden  from  their  homes  on  the 
James  River,  a  forty-mile  journey  on  horse- 
back through  the  Blue  Ridge  Mountains.  These 
men  had  never  seen  a  Reaper,  but  they  had 

[60] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

faith.  They  were  notable  men.  Both  ordered 
machines,  and  Cyrus  McCormick  accepted  one 
of  the  orders  only,  as  he  was  not  satisfied  with 
the  way  his  Reaper  worked  in  grain  that  was 
wet.  It  was  apt  to  clog  in  the  grooves  that 
held  the  blade.  Even  in  this  darkest  and  most 
debt-ridden  period  of  his  life,  McCormick  was 
much  more  intent,  apparently,  upon  making 
his  Reapers  work  well  than  upon  winning  a 
fortune. 

Almost  breathlessly,  the  young  inventor  waited 
for  the  next  harvest.  This  was  the  unique 
difficulty  of  his  task,  that  he  had  only  a  few 
weeks  once  a  year  to  try  out  his  machine  and  to 
improve  it.  He  had  now  sold  two,  so  that 
there  were  three  Reapers  clicking  through  the 
grain-fields  in  the  Summer  of  1840.  They 
failed  to  operate  evenly.  Where  the  grain  was 
dry,  they  cut  well;  but  where  it  was  damp, 
they  clogged  and  at  times  refused  to  cut  at  all. 

Wet  grain!  This,  after  nine  years  of  arduous 
labor,  still  remained  a  stubborn  obstacle  to 
the  success  of  the  Reaper.  It  was  especially 
hard  to  overcome,  because  in  that  primitive 

[61] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

neighborhood  McCormick  could  not  secure  the 
best  workmanship  in  the  making  of  the  cutting- 
blade.  However,  this  obstacle  did  not  daunt 
him.  He  gave  his  blade  a  more  serrated  edge, 
and  to  his  delight  it  cut  down  the  wet  grain 
very  nearly  as  neatly  as  the  dry. 

This  success  had  cost  him  another  year,  for 
he  sold  no  machines  in  1841.  But  he  had  now, 
at  least,  a  wholly  satisfactory  Reaper.  Fortified 
with  a  testimonial  from  Abraham  Smith,  he 
fixed  the  price  at  $100  and  became  a  salesman. 
By  great  persistence  he  sold  seven  Reapers  in 
1842,  twenty-nine  in  1843,  and  fifty  in  1844. 
At  last,  after  thirteen  years  of  struggle  and 
defeat,  Cyrus  McCormick  had  succeeded;  and 
the  home  farm  was  transformed  into  a  busy 
and  triumphant  Reaper  factory. 

There  were  new  obstacles,  of  course.  A  few 
buyers  failed  to  pay.  Four  machines  were 
held  on  loitering  canal-boats  until  they  were 
too  late  for  the  harvest.  There  was  strong 
opposition  in  several  places  by  day  laborers. 
A  trusted  workman  who  was  sent  out  to  collect 
$300  ran  away  with  both  horse  and  money. 

[62] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

But  none  of  tMese  trifles  moved  the  victorious 
McCormick.  The  great  stubborn  world  was 
about  to  surrender,  and  he  knew  it. 

By  1844  he  had  done  more  than  sell  machines. 
He  had  made  converts.  One  enthusiastic 
farmer  named  James  M.  Hite,  who  had  made 
a  world's  record  in  1843  by  cutting  175  acres 
of  wheat  in  less  than  eight  days,  was  the  first 
of  these  apostles  of  the  Reaper.  "My  Reaper 
has  more  than  paid  for  itself  in  one  harvest," 
he  said;  and  he  gave  $1,333  for  the  right  to  sell 
Reapers  in  eight  counties.  Closely  after  this 
man  came  Colonel  Tutwiler,  who  agreed  to  pay 
$2,500  for  the  right  to  sell  in  southern  Virginia. 
And  a  manufacturer  in  Richmond,  J.  Parker, 
bought  an  agency  in  five  counties  for  $500; 
and  won  the  renown  of  being  the  first  business 
man  who  appreciated  the  Reaper.  All  this 
money  was  not  paid  in  at  once.  Some  of  it 
was  never  paid.  But  after  thirteen  years  of 
struggle  and  debt,  this  was  Big  Business. 

Best  of  all,  orders  for  seven  Reapers  had  come 
from  the  West.  Two  farmers  in  Tennessee 
and  one  each  in  Wisconsin,  Missouri,  Iowa, 

[63] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

Illinois,  and  Ohio,  had  written  to  McCormick 
for  "  Virginia  Reapers,"  as  they  were  called  in 
the  farm  papers  of  that  day.  These  seven 
letters,  as  may  be  imagined,  brought  great  joy 
and  satisfaction  to  the  McCormick  family, 
which  was  now,  under  the  leadership  of  Cyrus, 
devoting  its  best  energies  to  the  making  of 
Reapers.  The  Reapers  were  made  and  then, 
when  the  question  of  their  transportation  arose, 
Cyrus  for  the  first  time  saw  clearly  that  the 
Virginia  farm  was  not  the  best  site  for  a  factory. 
To  get  the  seven  Reapers  to  the  West,  they  had 
first  to  be  carried  in  wagons  to  Scottsville,  then 
by  canal  to  Richmond,  re-shipped  down  the 
James  River  to  the  Atlantic  Ocean  and  around 
Florida  to  New  Orleans,  transferred  here  to 
a  river  boat  that  went  up  the  Mississippi  and 
Ohio  Rivers  to  Cincinnati,  and  from  Cincinnati 
in  various  directions  to  the  expectant  farmers. 
Four  of  these  Reapers  arrived  too  late  for  the 
harvest  of  1844,  and  two  of  them  were  not  paid 
for.  Clearly,  something  must  be  done  to  sup- 
ply the  Western  farmers  more  efficiently 
At  this  time  a  friend  said  to  him,  "Cyrus, 

[641 


The   |.ri.»-   of  the    i<M|,roM-.l     »«•„,„  r    r..n,,,lrCr    uitli  rnU.  r  urn  -i<  Ul.  -.  (Miiion    aii.lilrm-r   ini.l    "itll    lull 

iiniiraiilf.'  n-  lit  i(i  |«-rr,.rm.>iiii  <  ,  |ir.il,  rhni;  !h<  |iut,  IIIIS.T  fc.iin  nuv  h.'li:,i  .1  M  I"-  il  it  •.linll  ii.it  |.,  :  l«i  1-1  .1.  |.  pn  M  nt.'il.  i«  >t|ll  lull 
|II5  il'r«»h  l<  |i,ii,loii  id-lit,  -n  :ii  ill  in  iinittiiliMk  ..i  .u  ill,  |.la..-  I.,  l\fi,-li  *  i>  .,r.l.-i.  .1  »ln|,|.,  tl.  ,.i  sl'jn  ivhn,  r'.'lll  i,  i,.,i,l  ,.»  <MiM  r\ 
H<  nlu<t>>  HIM!  Id.  Italtniri- on  ll,,  l,i  I ),  ,  .  IU|HT  u>  \t  x>  -ill  -i\  |,  i  .  .  uf.  uili>rr<l  nl'li-i  l-ij.ih  n.  \I. 

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l.ak,  -,   Kii.  r-.  (.,„.,!  or    Ituil   !{,..,.!  at  |,ur,  I,.,.,  r- 

McC'ORMICK,  OGDEN  &  CO. 


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AN    EARLY   ADVERTISEMENT   FOR   McCORMICK'S    PATENT   VIRGINIA   REAPER 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

why  don't  you  go  West  with  your  Reaper, 
where  the  land  is  level  and  labor  is  scarce?" 
His  mind  was  ripe  for  this  idea.  It  was  the  call 
of  the  West.  So  one  morning  he  put  $300  into 
his  belt  and  set  off  on  a  3,000-mile  journey 
to  establish  the  empire  of  the  Reaper.  Up 
through  Pennsylvania  he  rode  by  stage  to  Lake 
Ontario,  then  westward  through  Ohio,  Michi- 
gan, Illinois,  Wisconsin,  Iowa,  and  Missouri. 

For  the  first  time  he  saw  the  prairies.  So 
vast,  so  flat,  so  fertile,  these  boundless  plains 
amazed  him.  And  he  was  quick  to  see  that 
this  great  land  ocean  was  the  natural  home  of 
the  Reaper.  Virginia  might,  but  the  West 
must,  accept  his  new  machine. 

Already  the  West  was  in  desperate  need  of  a 
quicker  way  to  cut  grain.  As  McCormick  rode 
through  Illinois,  he  saw  the  most  convincing 
argument  in  favor  of  his  Reaper.  He  saw  hogs 
and  cattle  turned  into  fields  of  ripe  wheat,  for 
lack  of  laborers  to  gather  it  in.  The  fertile 
soil  had  given  Illinois  five  million  bushels  of 
wheat,  and  it  was  too  much.  It  was  more  than 
the  sickle  and  the  scythe  could  cut.  Men 

[65] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

toiled  and  sweltered  to  save  the  yellow  affluence 
from  destruction.  They  worked  by  day  and 
by  night;  and  their  wives  and  children  worked. 
But  the  tragic  aspect  of  the  grain  crop  is  this  — 
it  must  be  gathered  quickly  or  it  breaks  down 
and  decays.  It  will  not  wait.  The  harvest 
season  lasts  from  four  to  ten  days  only.  And 
whoever  cannot  snatch  his  grain  from  the  field 
during  this  short  period  must  lose  it. 

Truly,  the  West  needed  the  Reaper;  and 
McCormick's  first  plan  was  to  overcome  the 
transportation  obstacle  by  selling  licenses  to 
many  manufacturers  in  many  States.  By  1846 
he  had,  with  herculean  energy,  started  Fitch 
&  Company  and  Seymour,  Morgan  &  Com- 
pany in  Brockport,  N.  Y.,  Henry  Bear  in 
Missouri,  Gray  &  Warner  in  Illinois,  and 
A.  C.  Brown  in  Cincinnati.  These  manu- 
facturers, and  the  McCormick  family  in  Vir- 
ginia, built  190  Reapers  for  the  harvest  of  1846. 
This  was  multiplying  the  business  by  four,  very 
nearly,  but  the  plan  was  not  satisfactory. 
Some  manufacturers  used  poor  materials; 
some  had  unskilled  workmen;  and  one  became 

[66] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

so  absorbed  in  new  experiments  that  when  the 
harvest  time  arrived,  his  machines  were  not 
completed. 

The  new  difficulty  was  not  to  get  manufac- 
turers to  make  Reapers,  but  to  get  them  to  make 
good  Reapers.  What  was  to  be  done?  The 
thought  of  having  defective  Reapers  scattered 
among  the  farmers  was  intolerable  to  Cyrus 
McCormick.  He  pondered  deeply  over  the 
whole  situation.  He  considered  the  fact  that 
the  supremacy  in  wheat  was  slowly  passing 
from  Virginia  to  Ohio.  He  took  note  of  the 
railroads  that  were  creeping  westward.  He 
remembered  the  limitless  prairies,  far  out  in  the 
sunset  country,  that  were  still  uncultivated. 
Plainly,  he  must  make  Reapers  in  a  factory  of 
his  own,  so  as  to  have  them  made  well,  and  he 
must  locate  that  factory  as  near  as  possible  to 
the  prairies,  at  some  point  along  the  Great  Lakes. 
With  the  most  painstaking  diligence  he  studied 
the  map  and  finally  he  put  his  finger  upon  a 
town  —  a  small  new  town,  which  bore  the 
strange  name  of  Chicago. 


[67] 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   BUILDING  OF   THE    REAPER  BUSINESS 

all  the  cities  that  Cyrus  McCormick  had 
seen  in  his  3,000-mile  journey,  Chicago 
was  unquestionably  the  youngest,  the  ugliest, 
and  the  most  forlorn.  It  lacked  the  comforts  of 
ordinary  life,  and  many  of  the  necessities.  For 
the  most  part,  it  was  the  residuum  of  a  broken 
land  boom ;  and  most  of  its  citizens  were  remain- 
ing in  the  hope  that  they  might  persuade  some 
incoming  stranger  to  buy  them  out. 

The  little  community,  which  had  absurdly 
been  called  a  city  ten  years  before,  had  at  this 
time  barely  ten  thousand  people  —  as  many  as 
are  now  employed  by  a  couple  of  its  department 
stores.  It  was  exhausted  by  a  desperate  struggle 
with  mud,  dust,  floods,  droughts,  cholera,  debt, 
panics,  broken  banks,  and  a  slump  in  land 
values.  Other  cities  ridiculed  its  ambitions  and 
called  it  a  mudhole.  Its  harbor,  into  which  six 
small  schooners  ventured  in  1847,  was  ob- 
structed by  a  sand-bar.  And  the  entire  region, 

[681 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

for  miles  back  from  the  lake,  was  a  dismal  swamp 
-the  natural  home  of  frogs,  wild  ducks,  and 
beavers. 

The  six  years  between  1837  and  1843  had 
been  to  Illinois  a  period  of  the  deepest  discour- 
agement. There  was  little  or  no  money  that 
any  one  could  accept  with  confidence.  Trade 
was  on  a  barter  basis.  The  State  was  hopelessly 
in  debt.  It  had  borrowed  $14,000,000  in  the 
enthusiasm  of  its  first  land  boom,  and  now  had 
no  money  to  pay  the  interest.  Even  as  late  as 
1846  there  was  only  $9,000  in  the  State  treasury. 
Buffalo  was  at  this  time  the  chief  grain  market 
of  the  United  States.  We  were  selling  a  little 
wheat  to  foreign  countries  —  much  less  than  is 
grown  to-day  in  Oklahoma.  Hulled  corn  was 
the  staff  of  life  in  Iowa.  The  Mormons  had 
just  started  from  Illinois  on  their  1,500-mile 
pilgrimage  to  the  West,  through  a  country  that 
had  not  a  road,  a  village,  a  bridge,  nor  a  well. 
The  sewing-machine  had  recently  been  invented 
by  Howe,  and  the  use  of  ether  had  been  an- 
nounced by  Dr.  Morton;  but  there  was  no  Hoe 
press,  nor  Bessemer  steel,  nor  even  so  much  as  a 

[69] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

postage  stamp.  And  in  the  Old  World  the  two 
most  impressive  figures,  perhaps,  were  Living- 
stone, the  missionary,  who  was  groping  his  way 
to  the  heart  of  the  Dark  Continent,  and  De- 
Lesseps,  the  master-builder  of  canals,  who 
was  now  cutting  a  channel  through  the  hot 
sand  at  Suez. 

In  Chicago,  there  was  at  this  time  no  Board 
of  Trade.  The  first  wheat  had  been  exported 
nine  years  before  —  as  much  as  would  load  an 
ordinary  wagon.  There  was  no  paved  street, 
except  one  short  block  of  wooden  paving.  The 
houses  were  rickety,  unpainted  frame  shanties, 
which  had  not  even  the  dignity  of  being  num- 
bered. There  was  a  school,  a  jail,  a  police 
force  of  six,  a  theatre,  and  a  fire-engine.  But 
there  was  no  railroad,  nor  telegraph,  nor  gas, 
nor  sewer,  nor  stock-yards.  The  only  post- 
office  was  a  little  frame  shack  on  Clark  Street, 
with  one  window  and  one  clerk;  and  one  of  the 
lesser  hardships  of  the  citizens  was  to  stand  in 
line  here  on  rainy  days. 

Prosperity  was  still  an  elusive  hope  in  1847, 
but  the  spirit  of  depression  was  being  overcome. 

[70] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

The  Federal  bankrupt  law  of  1842  had  broken 
the  deadlock,  and  the  Legislature  had  passed 
several  "Hard  Times"  measures  for  the  relief 
of  debtors.  To  such  an  extent  had  the  little 
community  recovered  its  confidence  that  it 
opened  a  new  theatre,  welcomed  its  first  circus, 
founded  a  law-school,  launched  a  new  daily 
paper  called  the  Tribune,  and  organized  a 
regiment  for  the  Mexican  War. 

There  were  two  Chicago  events  in  this  year 
which  must  have  deeply  impressed  Cyrus  Mc- 
Cormick.  The  first  Tvas  the  arrival  of  a  horde 
of  hunger-driven  immigrants  from  Ireland.  The 
famine  of  1846,  which  had  caused  210,000 
deaths  in  that  unfortunate  island,  was  driving 
the  survivors  to  America;  and  the  people  of 
Chicago  showed  the  warmest  sympathy  towards 
these  gaunt,  sad-faced  newcomers.  Even  in 
the  depth  of  her  own  depression,  Chicago  called 
a  special  meeting  to  consider  what  could  be 
done  to  alleviate  the  suffering  of  the  Irish,  and 
gave  several  thousand  dollars  for  their  relief. 

The  second  event  was  the  holding  of  the  great 
"River  and  Harbor  Convention"  in  Chicago. 

[71] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

This  was  the  first  formal  recognition  of  Chicago 
by  Congress,  and  gave  the  greatest  possible 
amount  of  delight  and  reassurance  to  its  citizens. 
Abraham  Lincoln,  who  had  just  been  elected  to 
Congress,  was  there;  and  Horace  Greeley  and 
Thurlow  Weed.  There  was  a  grand  procession 
in  the  muddy  little  main  street.  A  ship  under 
full  sail  was  hauled  through  the  city  on  wheels. 
The  newly  organized  firemen,  in  the  glory  of 
red  shirts  and  leather  hats,  threw  a  stream  of 
water  over  the  flag-staff  in  the  public  square, 
and  Thurlow  Weed,  in  a  peroration  that  aroused 
the  utmost  enthusiasm,  prophesied  that  "on  the 
shores  of  these  lakes  is  a  vast  country  that  will 
in  fifty  years  support  one-quarter  of  a  million 
people."  It  is  interesting  to  notice  that  had 
Thurlow  Weed  lived  fifty  years  after  the  delivery 
of  that  optimistic  prophecy,  he  would  have  seen 
one-quarter  of  a  million  school  children  in  the 
city  of  Chicago  alone. 

As  a  matter  of  history,  the  arrival  of  McCor- 
mick  was  a  much  more  important  event  for 
Chicago  than  the  "River  and  Harbor  Conven- 
tion." He  was  the  first  of  its  big  manufacturers. 

[72] 


HIS          LIFE          AND          WORK 

His  factory  was  the  largest  and  the  busiest; 
and  the  Reapers  that  it  produced  were  a  most 
important  factor  in  the  growth  of  Chicago. 
Every  Reaper  shipped  to  the  West  was  a  feeder 
of  the  city.  It  brought  back  more  wheat.  It 
opened  up  new  territory.  The  Reaper  gave  the 
farmers  of  the  Middle  West  an  ideal  weapon 
with  which  to  win  wrealth  from  the  prairies. 
And  it  established  the  primary  greatness 
of  Chicago  as  the  principal  wheat  market  of 
the  world. 

This  incoming  flood  of  wheat  gave  Chicago 
its  start  as  a  railway  and  shipping  centre.  Chi- 
cago was  never  obliged  to  give  money,  or  to  lend 
it,  to  railroad  companies.  The  railroads  came 
into  Chicago  without  the  inducement  of  sub- 
sidies, because  they  wanted  to  carry  its  wheat. 
And  ships,  too,  came  more  and  more  readily  to 
Chicago  when  they  found  that  they  could  be 
sure  of  a  return  cargo. 

The  choice  of  Chicago  as  his  centre  of  opera- 
tions was  one  of  the  master-strokes  of  McCor- 
mick's  career.  At  that  time,  Cleveland,  Mil- 
waukee, and  St.  Louis  were  more  prosperous 

[73] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMlCK 

cities;  but  McCormick  considered  one  thing 
only  —  the  making  and  selling  of  his  Reaper, 
and  he  saw  that  Chicago,  with  all  its  mud  and 
shabbiness,  was  the  link  between  the  Great 
Lakes  and  the  Great  West.  Here  he  could  best 
assemble  his  materials  —  steel  from  Sheffield, 
pig  iron  from  Scotland  and  Pittsburg,  and 
white  ash  from  Michigan.  And  here  he  could 
best  ship  his  finished  machines  to  both  East 
and  West, 

Chicago,  in  fact,  and  the  McCormick  Reaper, 
had  many  characteristics  in  common.  Both 
were  born  at  very  nearly  the  same  time.  Both 
were  cradled  in  adversity.  Both  were  unsightly 
to  the  artistic  eye.  Both  were  linked  closely 
with  the  development  of  the  West.  And  both 
inevitably  achieved  success,  because  they  were 
fundamentally  right  —  Chicago  in  location  and 
the  Reaper  in  design. 

At  the  time  that  he  began  to  build  his  Chicago 
factory,  Cyrus  McCormick  was  no  longer  a 
country  youth.  He  was  thirty-eight  years  of 
age,  and  a  tall  powerful  Titan  of  a  man,  with 
a  massive  head  and  broad  shoulders.  His 

[74] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

upper  lip  was  clean-shaven,  but  he  had  a  thick, 
well-trimmed  beard,  and  dark,  wavy  hair, 
worn  fairly  long.  His  nose  was  straight  and 
well-shaped,  his  mouth  firm,  and  his  eyes 
brown-gray  and  piercing.  In  manner  he  was 
resolute  and  prompt,  with  a  rigid  insistence 
that  could  not  be  turned  aside.  He  had  won 
the  prize  in  the  contest  of  reaper-inventors; 
and  he  was  now  about  to  enter  a  second  contest, 
against  overwhelming  odds,  with  a  number  of 
aggressive  and  competent  business  men  who 
had  determined  that,  by  right  or  by  might,  they 
would  manufacture  McCormick  Reapers  and 
sell  them  to  the  farmers. 

As  McCormick  had  neither  money  nor  credit, 
it  was  evident  to  him  that  his  first  step  in  busi- 
ness-building must  be  to  secure  a  partner  who 
had  both  of  these.  He  looked  about  him  and 
selected  the  man  who  was  unquestionably  the 
first  citizen  of  Chicago  —  William  B.  Ogden. 
Ogden  had  been  the  first  mayor  of  the  little  city. 
He  had  been  from  the  beginning  its  natural 
leader.  He  had  built  the  first  handsome  house, 
promoted  the  first  canal,  and  was  now  busy  in 

[75] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

the  building  of  the  first  railroad  from  Chicago 
to  Galena. 

William  Butler  Ogden  had  been  born  in  the 
little  New  York  hamlet  of  Walton,  four  years 
earlier  than  the  birth  of  McCormick.  To  use 
his  own  picturesque  words,  he  "was  born  close 
to  a  saw-mill,  was  early  left  an  orphan,  chris- 
tened in  a  mill-pond,  taught  at  a  log  school- 
house,  and  at  fourteen  fancied  that  nothing  was 
impossible,  which  ever  since,  and  with  some 
success,  I  have  been  trying  to  prove."  Once 
in  Chicago  he  quickly  made  a  fortune  in 
real  estate,  and  was  generally  looked  to  as  the 
leader  in  any  large  enterprise  that  promised 
to  help  Chicago. 

He  was  a  tall  man  of  striking  appearance. 
At  that  time  he  wore  no  beard,  and  with  his 
keen  eyes,  high  forehead,  long  straight  nose, 
and  masterful  under-lip,  he  would  attract 
attention  in  any  assemblage.  By  his  hospi- 
tality and  courtly  manners  he  made  many 
friends  for  the  city.  Among  his  guests  were 
Webster,  Van  Buren,  Bryant,  Tilden,  and  Miss 
Martineau.  And  when  Cyrus  McCormick 

[76] 


CYRUS  HALL  McCORMICK 
From  a  Daguerreotype,  taken  about 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

came  to  him  and  proposed  the  building  of  a 
Reaper  factory,  Ogden  was  as  quick  as  a  flash 
to  see  its  value  to  Chicago.  'You  are  the  man 
we  want,"  said  he  to  McCormick.  "I  '11  give 
you  $25,000  for  a  half  interest,  and  we  '11  start 
to  build  the  factory  at  once." 

This  partnership  helped  McCormick  greatly. 
It  gave  him  at  once  capital,  credit,  prestige, 
and  a  factory.  It  enabled  him  to  escape  from 
the  tyranny  of  small  anxieties.  It  set  him  free 
from  contract-breaking  manufacturers,  who 
looked  upon  the  making  of  Reapers  merely  as 
business,  and  not,  as  McCormick  did,  as  a  mis- 
sion. He  now  had  his  chance  to  manufacture 
on  a  large  scale;  and  he  immediately  made 
plans  to  sell  500  Reapers  for  the  harvest  of  1848. 
He  built  the  largest  factory  in  Chicago,  on  the 
spot  where  John  Kinzie  had  built  the  first 
house  in  1804,  and  thus  once  for  all  was  solved 
the  problem  of  where  ancj  how  his  Reapers 
should  be  made. 

For  two  years  it  was  one  of  the  sights  of 
Chicago  to  see  McCormick  and  Ogden  walking 
together  to  their  factory.  They  were  both  tall, 

[77] 


CYKUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

powerful,  dominating  men,  and  were  easily 
the  chief  citizens  —  the  Romulus  and  Remus 
of  a  city  that  was  destined  to  be  more  populous 
than  Rome. 

But  they  were  not  suited  as  co-workers. 
Each  was  too  strong-willed  for  co-operative 
action.  Also,  Ogden  was  a  man  of  many  in- 
terests, while  McCormick  was  absorbed  in  his 
Reaper.  There  was  no  open  quarrel,  but  in 
1849  McCormick  said:  "I  will  pay  you  back  the 
$25,000  that  you  invested,  and  give  you  $25,000 
for  profits  and  interest."  Ogden  accepted, 
well  pleased  to  have  doubled  his  money  in 
two  years;  and  from  that  time  onward  Mc- 
Cormick had  no  partners  except  the  members 
of  his  own  family. 

Moving  at  once  from  one  obstacle  to  another, 
as  McCormick  did  throughout  the  whole  course 
of  his  life,  he  now  began  to  create  the  best 
possible  system  of  selling  his  Reapers  to  the 
farmers.  This  he  had  to  do,  for  the  reason  that 
there  was  no  means  at  that  time  whereby  he 
could  offer  them  for  sale.  The  village  black- 
smith was  too  busy  at  his  anvil  to  become  an 

[781 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

agent.  The  village  storekeeper  was  not  a 
mechanic,  and  was  too  careful  of  his  reputation 
among  the  farmers  to  offer  for  sale  a  machine 
that  he  did  not  understand.  Therefore,  Mc- 
Cormick  bent  all  his  energies  to  this  new  task 
of  devising  a  mode  of  action.  He  began  to 
develop  what  he  was  apt  to  call  "the  finger-ends 
of  the  business."  And  he  created  a  new  species 
of  commercial  organization  which  is  by  many 
thought  to  be  fully  as  remarkable  as  his  in- 
vention of  the  Reaper. 

First,  he  gave  a  Written  Guarantee  with  every 
machine.  He  had  conceived  of  this  inducement 
as  early  as  1842.  He  "warranted  the  per- 
formance of  the  Reaper  in  every  respect,"  and 
by  this  means  made  seven  sales  in  that  year. 
In  1848  he  had  his  guarantee  printed  like  an 
advertisement,  with  a  picture  of  the  Reaper  at 
the  top,  and  blank  spaces  for  the  farmer,  the 
agent,  and  two  witnesses  to  sign.  The  price 
of  the  machine  was  to  be  $120.  The  farmer 
was  to  pay  $30  cash,  and  the  balance  in  six 
months,  on  condition  that  the  Reaper  would 
cut  one  and  a  half  acres  an  hour,  that  it  would 

[79] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

scatter  less  grain  than  the  grain-cradle,  that 
it  was  well  made,  and  that  the  raking  off 
could  easily  be  done  from  a  raker's  seat. 
If  the  Reaper  failed  to  fulfil  these  promises, 
it  was  to  be  brought  back  and  the  $30  was 
to  be  refunded. 

This  idea  of  giving  a  free  trial,  and  returning 
the  money  to  any  dissatisfied  customer,  was  at 
that  time  new  and  revolutionary.  To-day  it  is 
the  code  of  the  department  store,  and  even  the 
mail-order  establishments  are  in  many  instances 
adopting  it.  It  has  become  one  of  the  higher 
laws  of  the  business  world.  It  has  driven  that 
discreditable  maxim,  "Let  the  buyer  beware," 
out  of  all  decent  commercialism.  To  Mc- 
Cormick,  who  had  never  studied  the  selfish 
economic  theories  of  his  day,  there  was  no 
reason  for  any  antagonism  between  buyer  and 
seller.  He  trusted  his  Reaper  and  he  trusted 
the  farmers.  And  he  built  his  business  four- 
square on  this  confidence. 

Second,  he  sold  his  Reapers  at  a  Known 
Price.  He  announced  the  price  in  newspapers 
and  posters.  This,  too,  has  since  become  an 

[80] 


HIS         LIFE        AND         WORK 

established  rule  in  business;  but  it  was  not  so 
sixty  years  ago.  The  Oriental  method  of 
chaffering  and  bargaining  was  largely  in  vogue. 
The  buyer  got  as  high  a  price  as  he  could  in 
each  case.  Among  merchants,  A.  T.  Stewart 
was  probably  the  first  to  abolish  this  practice 
of  haggling,  and  to  mark  his  goods  in  plain 
figures.  And  in  the  selling  of  farm  machinery, 
it  was  McCormick  who  laid  down  the  principle 
of  equal  prices  to  all  and  special  rebates  to 
none  —  a  principle  which  has  been  very  gen- 
erally followed  ever  since,  except  during  periods 
of  over-strenuous  competition. 

Third,  he  was  one  of  the  first  American  busi- 
ness men  who  believed  heartily  in  a  policy  of 
Publicity.  As  early  as  September  28,  1833,  he 
began  to  advertise  his  Reaper;  and  his  adver- 
tisement was  nearly  a  column  in  length.  Also, 
in  the  same  paper,  he  had  a  half-column  adver- 
tisement of  his  hillside  plow.  This  was  pub- 
licity on  a  large  scale,  according  to  the  ideas  of 
advertising  that  were  then  prevalent.  Even 
George  Washington,  when  advertising  an  ex- 
tensive land  scheme  in  1773,  had  not  thought 

[81] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

of  using  more  than  half  a  column  of  a  Balti- 
more paper. 

McCormick  was  an  efficient  advertiser,  too, 
as  well  as  an  enterprising  one.  When  he  talked 
to  farmers,  he  knew  what  to  say.  He  told 
the  story  of  what  one  of  his  Reapers  had  done, 
and  named  the  time  and  the  farm  and  the 
farmers.  He  made  great  use  of  the  argument 
that  the  Reaper  pays  for  itself,  and  showed  that 
it  would  cost  the  farmer  less  to  buy  it  than  not 
to  buy  it. 

Among  the  many  testimonials  that  he  got 
from  farmers  the  one  that  pleased  him  most, 
and  which  he  scattered  broadcast,  was  one  in 
which  a  farmer  said:  "My  Reaper  has  more 
than  paid  for  itself  in  one  harvest." 

In  1849,  when  the  rush  to  the  new  gold  mines 
of  California  began,  he  was  quick  to  see  his 
opportunity.  This  sudden  exodus  of  a  hundred 
thousand  men  to  the  Pacific  coast  meant  much 
to  him,  and  he  knew  it.  It  meant  a  decrease 
in  the  number  of  farm  laborers  and  an  in- 
crease in  the  amount  of  money  in  circulation. 


[82] 


PANORAMIC   VIEW   SHOWING  THE   McCORMICK   REAPER   WORKS   BEFORE   THE 


CHICAGO   FIRE   OF   1871,   ON    CHICAGO   RIVKR,    EAST   OF   RUSH   STREET   BRIDGE 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

More  than  this,  it  meant  that  Chicago  was  no 
lorger  a  city  of  the  Far  West.  It  was  central. 
It  was  the  link  between  the  banks  and  factories 
of  the  East  and  the  gold  mines  and  prairies  of 
the  West.  So  McCormick  quickly  prepared  an 
elaborate  advertisement,  warning  the  farmers 
that  labor  would  now  become  scarce  and  ex- 
pensive, that  the  coming  grain  crop  promised 
to  be  a  large  one,  and  giving  the  names  and 
addresses  of  ninety-two  farmers  who  were  now 
using  his  machines. 

The  fourth  factor  in  the  McCormick  System 
was  the  appointment  of  a  Responsible  Agent  and 
the  building  of  a  storage  warehouse  at  every 
competitive  point.  He  did  not  wait  for  the 
business  to  grow.  He  pushed  it.  He  thrust 
it  forward  by  sending  an  agent  to  every  danger- 
spot  on  the  firing-line.  As  one  of  his  compet- 
itors complained,  in  an  1848  lawsuit,  McCor- 
mick "flooded  the  country  with  his  machines." 
He  knew  that  many  farmers  would  be  unde- 
cided until  the  very  hour  of  harvest,  when  there 
would  be  no  time  to  get  a  Reaper  from  Chicago ; 


[83] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

and  therefore  he  had  supplies  of  machines  stored 
in  various  parts  of  the  country.  By  1849  he 
had  nineteen  of  these  agencies. 

His  plan,  with  regard  to  these  agents,  was 
to  fasten  them  to  him  by  exclusive  contracts, 
which  forbade  them  to  sell  Reapers  made  by 
any  other  manufacturers.  Each  agent  was 
given  free  scope.  He  was  not  worried  by  detail 
instructions.  He  was  picked  out  for  his  aggres- 
sive, self-reliant  qualities,  and  the  whole  respon- 
sibility of  a  certain  territory  was  put  upon  him. 
Once  a  month  he  made  a  report;  but  he  stood 
or  fell  by  the  final  showing  for  the  year,  which 
he  made  in  October.  This  plan  of  leaving  his 
men  free  and  putting  them  upon  their  mettle, 
developed  their  mental  muscle  to  the  utmost. 
Also,  it  made  them  intensely  loyal  and  combat- 
ive —  a  regiment,  not  of  private  soldiers,  but 
generals,  each  one  in  charge  of  his  own  prov- 
ince, blamed  for  his  defeats  and  rewarded  for 
his  victories. 

The  fifth  factor  in  the  McCormick  System 
was  the  Customers9  Good-Will.  For  the  good- 
will of  other  capitalists  or  for  the  applause  of 

[84] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

the  public  in  general,  no  men  cared  less  than 
McCormick.  But  he  always  stood  well  with 
the  farmers.  "I  have  never  yet  sued  a  farmer 
for  the  price  of  a  Reaper,"  he  said  in  1848.  This 
heroic  policy  he  pursued  as  long  as  possible, 
knowing  the  fear  that  all  farmers  have  of  con- 
tracts that  may  lead  them  into  litigation.  More 
than  this,  he  freely  gave  them  credit,  without 
being  safeguarded  by  any  Dun  or  Bradstreet. 
He  allowed  them  to  pay  with  the  money  that 
was  saved  during  the  harvest.  "It  is  better 
that  I  should  wait  for  the  money,"  he  said, 
"than  that  you  should  wait  for  the  machine 
that  you  need/'  So  he  borrowed  money  in 
Chicago  to  build  the  Reapers,  borrowed  more 
money  to  pay  the  freight,  and  then  sold  them 
on  time  to  the  farmers. 

In  some  cases  he  lost  heavily,  as  in  Kansas 
and  North  Dakota,  where  the  first  settlers  were 
driven  off  by  drought.  But  as  a  rule  he  lost  little 
by  bad  debts.  Immigrants  of  twenty  nationali- 
ties swarmed  westward  upon  the  free  land  offered 
to  them  by  the  United  States  Government,  and 
usually  each  man  found  waiting  for  him  at  the 

[85] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

nearest  town  one  of  the  McCormick  agents, 
ready  to  supply  him  with  a  Reaper,  whether  he 
had  the  money  to  pay  for  it  or  not.  As  may  be 
imagined,  the  effect  of  this  policy  upon  the  settle- 
ment and  welfare  of  the  West  was  magical. 
There  are  to-day  tens  of  thousands  of  Western 
farmers  who  date  the  era  of  their  prosperity 
from  the  day  when  a  McCormick  Reaper  arrived 
in  all  the  glory  of  its  red  paint  and  shining  blade, 
and  held  its  first  reception  in  the  barn-yard. 

One  instance  of  this  deserves  to  be  embodied 
in  the  history  of  the  Reaper.  In  1855  a  poor 
tenant  farmer,  who  had  been  evicted  from  his 
rented  land  in  Ayrshire,  Scotland,  arrived  with 
his  family  at  the  banks  of  the  Mississippi. 
There  was  then  no  railroad  nor  stage-coach,  so 
the  whole  family  walked  to  a  quarter  section 
of  land  farther  west,  not  far  from  where  the  city 
of  Des  Moines  stands  to-day.  The  first  year 
they  cut  the  wheat  with  the  cradle  and  the 
scythe,  and  the  following  year  they  bought  a 
McCormick  Reaper.  They  prospered.  The 
father  went  back  for  a  visit  to  Ayrshire  and  paid 
all  his  creditors.  And  the  eldest  son,  James, 

[86] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

became  first  Speaker  of  the  Iowa  Legislature, 
then  a  professor  in  an  agricultural  college,  and 
finally  the  founder  of  the  Department  of  Agri- 
culture in  all  its  present  completeness.  To-day 
we  know  him  as  the  Honorable  James  Wilson, 


the  first  official  farmer  of  the  United  States. 

There  was  one  other  method  in  the  marketing 
of  farm  machinery,  which  seems  to  have  been 
originated  by  McCormick  —  the  Field  Test. 
As  a  means  of  stirring  up  interest  in  an  indif- 
ferent community,  this  was  the  most  electrical 
in  its  effects  of  any  plan  that  has  ever  been  de- 
vised. As  a  pioneering  advertisement,  it  was 
unsurpassed.  It  was  nothing  less  than  a  con- 
test in  a  field  of  ripe  grain  between  several  ma- 
chines that  belonged  to  rival  manufacturers. 
Sometimes  there  were  only  two  machines,  and 
in  one  grand  tournament  there  were  forty. 
And  all  the  farmers  in  the  county  were  invited 
to  come  and  witness  the  battle  free  of  charge. 

The  first  of  these  field  tests  occurred  near 
Richmond  in  1844.  McCormick  had  challenged 
Obed  Hussey,  a  Baltimore  sailor  who  had  in- 
vented a  practical  mowing-machine,  and  who 

[87] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

was  offering  it  for  sale  to  cut  grain  as  well  as 
grass.  In  this  instance  McCormick  won  easily. 
The  judges  said  that  while  the  Hussey  machine 
was  stronger  and  simpler,  having  no  reel  nor 
divider,  the  McCormick  Reaper  was  lighter, 
cheaper,  scattered  less  grain,  and  was  better  at 
cutting  grain  that  was  wet  and  in  its  method  of 
delivering  the  grain. 

"Meet  Hussey  whenever  you  can  and  put  him 
down,"  Cyrus  McCormick  wrote  to  his  brothers. 
In  one  letter,  written  the  following  year,  he  is 
so  enthusiastically  aggressive  in  the  pursuit  of 
Hussey  that  he  proposes  to  his  brothers  a  grand 
final  contest.  Hussey  is  to  be  dared  to  sign  an 
agreement  that  in  case  of  defeat,  he  will  pay 
McCormick  $10,000  and  become  the  Mary- 
land agent  for  the  McCormick  Reaper.  Mc- 
Cormick, on  his  part,  is  to  agree  that  if  he  is 
beaten  he  will  pay  Hussey  $10,000  and  become 
the  Virginia  agent  for  the  Hussey  machine. 
Nothing  came  of  this  confident  proposal,  either 
because  it  was  not  put  into  effect  by  McCormick, 
or  because  Hussey  refused  to  accept  it. 

But  the  field  test  flourished  for  more  than 

F881 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

forty  years.  It  did  more  in  the  earlier  days 
than  any  other  one  thing  to  make  talk  about 
the  Reaper  and  to  move  the  farmers  out  of  the 
old-fashioned  ruts.  It  provided  the  vaudeville 
element  which  is  necessary  in  salesmanship 
where  people  are  not  interested  in  the  commod- 
ity itself.  As  often  happens,  it  was  in  the  end 
carried  too  far.  It  became  the  most  costly 
weapon  of  competition.  It  introduced  all  man- 
ner of  unfairness  and  often  violence.  The  most 
absurd  tests  were  frequently  agreed  to.  Mowers 
would  be  chained  back  to  back  and  then  forcibly 
torn  apart.  Reapers  were  driven  into  groves 
of  saplings.  Machines  of  special  strength  were 
made  secretly.  And  so  the  warfare  raged,  until 
by  general  consent  the  field  test  was  abandoned. 

These  six  factors  of  the  McCormick  System 
became  the  six  commandments  of  the  farm 
machinery  business.  They  were  largely  adopted 
by  his  competitors,  and  exist  to-day,  with  the 
exception  of  the  exclusive  contract  and  the  field 
test. 

By  1850  McCorrnick  had  not  only  solved 
the  problem  of  the  Reaper;  he  had  worked  out 

[89] 


CYRUS     HALL     McCORMICK 

a  method  of  distribution.  He  had  established 
a  new  business.  But  even  this  was  not  enough. 
He  was  now  beset  by  a  swarm  of  manufacturers 
who  sought  to  deprive  him  of  his  patents  and 
of  a  business  which  he  naturally  regarded  as  his 
own.  It  remained  to  be  seen  whether  he  could 
stand  his  ground  when  opposed  by  several  hun- 
dred rivals;  and  whether  he  could  duplicate  in 
the  courts  the  victories  that  he  had  won  in  the 
fields. 


[90] 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE  STRUGGLE  TO  PROTECT  PATENTS 
TN  1848  Cyrus  McCormick's  original  patent 
-^  expired.  He  applied  to  have  it  extended, 
and  at  once  there  began  one  of  the  most  extra- 
ordinary legal  wars  ever  known  in  the  history  of 
the  Patent  Office.  It  continued  with  very  little 
cessation  until  1865.  It  enlisted  on  one  side  or 
the  other  the  ablest  lawyers  of  that  period  — 
such  giants  of  the  bar  as  Lincoln,  Stanton,  Sew- 
ard,  Douglas,  Harding,  Watson,  Dickerson, 
and  Beverdy  Johnson.  The  tide  of  battle  rolled 
from  court  to  court  until  the  final  clash  came 
in  the  chamber  of  the  Supreme  Court  and  the 
halls  of  Congress.  It  was  perhaps  the  most 
Titanic  effort  that  any  American  inventor  has 
ever  made  to  protect  his  rights  and  to  carry  out 
the  purpose  of  the  Patent  Law. 

McCormick  had  strong  reasons  for  believing 
that  his  patent  should  be  extended.  He  was 
asking  for  no  more  than  the  Patent  Office,  on 
other  occasions,  had  granted  to  other  inventors. 

[91] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

A  patent  was  supposed  to  protect  an  inventor 
for  fourteen  years,  and  he  had  lost  half  of  this 
time  in  making  a  better  machine,  and  in  finding 
out  the  best  way  to  carry  on  the  business.  He 
had  received  from  all  sources  nearly  $24,000,  and 
most  of  it  had  been  swallowed  up  in  expenses. 
He  was  still  a  poor  man  in  1848.  He  was  no 
more  than  on  the  threshold  of  prosperity.  And 
his  peculiar  difficulty,  which  gave  him  a  special 
claim  upon  the  Patent  Commissioners,  was  the 
shortness  of  the  harvest  season.  He  had  only 
three  or  four  weeks  in  each  year  in  which  he 
could  make  experiments. 

For  eight  years  McCormick's  claim  was  tossed 
back  and  forth  like  a  tennis  ball  between  the 
Patent  Office  and  Congress.  This  delay  threw 
the  door  wide  open  to  competition.  A  score  of 
manufacturers  built  factories  and  began  to  make 
McCormick  Reapers,  with  trifling  variations  and 
under  other  names.  If  McCormick  had  won 
his  case,  they  would  have  had  to  pay  him  a 
royalty  of  $25  on  each  machine.  Conse- 
quently, they  combined  against  him.  They 
hired  lawyers  and  lobbyists,  secured  petitions 

[92] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

from  farmers,  and  raised  a  hue  and  cry  that  one 
man  was  "trying  to  impose  a  tax  of  $500,000 
a  year  upon  the  starving  millions  of  the  world." 

One  firm  of  lawyers  in  Cincinnati  sent  a 
letter  to  these  manufacturers  in  1850,  saying 
that,  "McCormick  can  be  beaten  in  the  Patent 
Office,  and  must  be  beaten  now  or  never.  If 
funds  are  furnished  us,  we  shall  surely  beat  him; 
but  if  they  are  not  furnished  us,  he  will  as  cer- 
tainly beat  us.  Please,  therefore,  take  hold  and 
help  us  to  beat  the  common  enemy.  The  sub- 
scriptions have  ranged  from  $100  to  $1,000.  .  . 
Send  in  also  to  Patent  Office  hundreds  of  re- 
monstrances like  this :  We  oppose  the  extension 
of  C.  H.  McCormick's  patent.  He  has  made 
money  enough  off  of  the  farmer." 

Towards  the  end  of  this  famous  case,  the  anti- 
McCormick  lobby  at  the  Capitol  became  so 
rabid  that  Senator  Brown,  of  Mississippi,  made 
an  indignant  protest  on  the  floor  of  the  Senate. 
He  said:  "Why,  Mr.  President,  if  it  were  not  for 
the  people  out  of  doors,  people  without  inventive 
genius,  people  without  the  genius  to  invent  a 
mouse-trap  or  a  fly-killer,  who  are  pirating  on 

[93] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

the  great  invention  of  McCormick,  there  would 
never  have  been  an  hour's  delay  in  granting  all 
that  he  asks.  I  know,  and  I  state  here,  in  the 
face  of  the  American  Senate  and  the  world,  that 
these  men  have  beset  me  at  every  corner  of  the 
street  with  their  papers  and  their  affidavits  - 
men  who  have  no  claim  to  the  ear  of  the  coun- 
try, men  who  have  rendered  it  no  service, 
but  who  have  invested  their  paltry  dollars 
in  the  production  of  a  machine  which  sprang 
from  the  mind  of  another  man;  and  who  now, 
for  their  own  gain,  employ  lawyers  to  draw 
cunning  affidavits,  to  devise  cunning  schemes, 
and  to  put  on  foot  all  sorts  of  machinery  to 
defeat  McCormick." 

What  worried  McCormick  most  wras  not  this 
consolidation  of  competitors,  but  the  fact  that 
a  few  farmers  had  signed  petitions  of  protest 
against  his  claim.  This  was  "the  most  unkind- 
est  cut  of  all."  But  he  made  no  attack  upon 
them.  Manufacturers  he  would  fight,  and  in- 
ventors and  lawyers  and  judges  —  any  one  and 
every  one,  if  need  be,  except  farmers.  "  HOWT 
can  the  farmers  be  against  me?"  he  asked  in 

[94] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

amazement.  "  They  save  the  price  of  the  Reaper 
in  a  single  harvest." 

McCormick  lost  his  suit,  as  he  did  a  second 
time  in  1859,  and  a  third  time  in  1861.  Not 
one  of  his  patents  was  at  any  time  renewed.  Up 
to  1858  he  had  received  $40,000  in  royalties, 
but  it  had  cost  him  $90,000  in  litigation.  From 
first  to  last  he  did  not  get  one  dollar  of  net  profit 
from  the  protection  of  the  Patent  Office. 

Many  other  inventors  were  fairly  treated  by 
Congress.  Fulton,  for  example,  was  presented 
with  a  bonus  of  $76,300.  Willmoth,  who  im- 
proved the  turret  of  a  battleship,  received  $50,- 
000.  Professor  Page,  for  making  an  electric 
engine,  was  given  $20,000.  Morse  was  awarded 
$38,000.  The  patents  of  Goodyear,  Kelly, 
Howe,  Morse,  Hyatt,  Woodworth,  and  Blan- 
chard  were  extended.  The  protection  of  in- 
ventors had  been  a  national  policy  —  an  Ameri- 
can tradition.  In  the  phrasing  of  Daniel  Web- 
ster: "The  right  of  an  inventor  to  his  invention 
is  a  natural  right,  which  existed  before  the 
Constitution  was  written  and  which  is  above 
the  Constitution." 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

The  benefit  of  the  Reaper  to  the  nation,  and 
the  fact  that  McCormick  was  its  inventor,  were 
admitted  freely  enough.  Senator  Johnson,  of 
Maryland,  estimated  in  1858  that  the  Reaper 
was  then  worth  to  the  United  States  $55,000,000 
a  year.  D.  P.  Holloway,  the  Commissioner  of 
Patents,  sang  an  anthem  of  eloquent  praise  to 
McCormick  in  1861.  "He  is  an  inventor  whose 
fame,  while  he  is  yet  living,  has  spread  through 
the  world,*'  he  said.  "His  genius  has  done 
honor  to  his  own  country,  and  has  been  the 
admiration  of  foreign  nations.  He  will  live  in 
the  grateful  recollection  of  mankind  as  long  as 
the  reaping-machine  is  employed  in  gathering  the 
harvest."  Then,  in  an  abrupt  postscript  to  so 
fine  a  eulogy,  this  extraordinary  Commissioner 
adds:  "But  the  Reaper  is  of  too  great  value  to 
the  public  to  be  controlled  by  any  individual, 
and  the  extension  of  his  patent  is  refused." 

The  truth  seems  to  be  that  McCormick  was 
too  strong,  too  aggressive,  to  receive  fair  play 
at  the  hands  of  any  legislative  body.  The 
note  of  sympathy  could  never  be  struck  in  his 
favor.  He  personally  directed  his  own  cases. 

[90] 


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§  •  ,n  pBi$    «  ^ 

-"^  Cd  t"1  o*  o  ffi  —  •   "* 
3Frl|".I   ^ 

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-  =  =^_,-   _    n 


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-^  o  (i'|.s" 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

He  dominated  his  own  lawyers.  And  he  fought 
always  in  an  old-fashioned,  straight-from-the- 
shoulder  way  that  put  him  at  a  great  disadvan- 
tage in  a  legal  conflict.  Also,  he  was  supposed 
to  be  much  richer  than  in  reality  he  was.  He 
had  made  money  by  the  rise  in  Chicago  real 
estate.  By  1866  he  had  become  a  millionaire. 
And  his  entire  fortune  was  assumed  by  opposing 
lawyers  to  be  the  product  of  the  Reaper 
business. 

It  is  to  be  said,  to  the  lasting  honor  of  South 
Carolina,  that  she  gave  a  grant  of  money  to  Whit- 
ney, out  of  the  public  treasury,  as  a  token  of 
gratitude  for  the  invention  of  the  cotton  gin. 
But  no  wheat  State  ever  gave,  or  proposed  to 
give,  any  grant  or  vote  of  thanks  to  Cyrus  Mc- 
Cormick  for  the  invention  of  the  Reaper.  The 
business  that  he  established  was  never  at  any 
time  favored  by  a  tariff,  or  franchise,  or  patent 
extension,  or  tax  exemption,  or  land  grant,  or 
monopoly.  Single-handed  he  built  it  up,  and 
single-handed  he  held  it  against  all  comers.  If, 
as  Emerson  has  said,  an  institution  is  no  more 
than  "the  lengthened  shadow  of  one  man,"  we 

[97] 


CYRUS      HALL     McCORMICK 

may  fairly  say  that  the  immense  McCormick 
Company  of  to-day  is  no  more  than  the  length- 
ened shadow  of  this  farm-bred  Virginian. 

By  1855  McCormick  realized  that  the  Federal 
Government  was  not  the  impartial  tribunal  that 
he  had  believed  it  to  be.  He  saw  that  he  could 
not  depend  upon  it  for  protection,  so  he  made  a 
characteristic  decision  —  he  resolved  to  protect 
himself.  He,  too,  would  hire  a  battery  of  law- 
yers and  charge  down  upon  these  manufacturers 
who  were  unrighteously  making  his  Reaper  and 
depriving  him  of  his  patents.  He  engaged  three 
of  the  master  lawyers  of  the  American  bar, 
William  H.  Seward,  E.  N.  Dickerson,  and 
Senator  Reverdy  Johnson,  and  brought  suit 
against  Manny  and  Emerson,  of  Rockford, 
Illinois,  for  making  McCormick  Reapers  with- 
out a  license. 

Then  came  a  three-year  struggle  that  shook 
the  country  and  did  much  to  shape  the  history 
of  the  American  people.  Manny  and  Emerson, 
who  were  shrewd  and  forceful  men,  hired  twice 
as  many  lawyers  as  McCormick  and  prepared 
to  defend  themselves.  They  selected  as  the 

[98] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

members  of  this  legal  bodyguard.  Abraham 
Lincoln,  Stephen  A.  Douglas,  Edwin  M.  Stan- 
ton,  Peter  H.  Watson,  George  Harding,  and 
Congressman  H.  Winter  Davis. 

It  was  a  battle  of  giants.  Greek  met  Greek 
with  weapons  of  eloquence.  But  Stanton  out- 
classed his  great  co-debaters  in  a  speech  of 
unanswerable  power  which  unfortunately  was 
not  reported.  The  speech  so  vividly  im- 
pressed McCormick  that  in  his  next  law- 
suit he  at  once  engaged  Stanton.  It  awoke 
the  brain  of  Lincoln,  as  he  afterwards  admitted; 
and  drove  him  back  to  a  more  comprehensive 
study  of  the  law.  It  gave  Lincoln  so  high 
an  opinion  of  Stanton's  ability  that,  when  he 
became  President  several  years  later,  he 
chose  Stanton  to  be  his  Secretary  of  War. 
And  it  gripped  judge  and  jury  with  such 
effect  that  McCormick  lost  his  case.  It  was 
a  wonderful  speech. 

Abraham  Lincoln,  who  made  no  speech  at 
all,  was  the  one  who  derived  the  most  benefit  in 
the  end  from  this  lawsuit.  It  not  only  aroused 
his  ambitions,  but  gave  him  his  first  big  fee  — 

[99] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

$1,000.  This  money  came  to  him  at  the  precis^ 
moment  when  he  needed  it  most,  to  enable  him 
to  enter  into  the  famous  debate  with  Douglas  — 
the  debate  that  made  him  the  inevitable  can- 
didate of  the  Republican  party.  It  is  interest- 
ing to  note  how  closely  the  destinies  of  Lincoln 
and  McCormick  were  interwoven.  Both  were 
born  in  1809,  on  farms  in  the  South.  Both 
struggled  through  a  youth  of  adversity  and  first 
came  into  prominence  in  Illinois.  Both  labored 
to  preserve  the  Union,  and  when  the  War  of 
Secession  came  it  was  the  Reaper  that  enabled 
Lincoln  to  feed  his  armies.  Both  men  were 
emancipators,  the  one  from  slavery  and  the  other 
from  famine;  and  both  to-day  sleep  under  the 
soil  of  Illinois.  No  other  two  Americans  had 
heavier  tasks  than  they,  and  none  worked  more 
mightily  for  the  common  good. 

Of  all  McCormick's  lawsuits,  and  they  were 
many,  the  most  extraordinary  was  the  famous 
Baggage  Case,  which  lasted  for  twenty-three 
years  —  from  1862  to  1885.  It  was  probably  the 
best  single  instance  of  the  man's  dogged  tenacity 
in  defence  of  a  principle.  The  original  cause 

[100] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

of  this  trial  was  a  comedy  of  mishaps.  A  Mc- 
Cormick  family  party  of  six,  with  nine  trunks, 
boarded  a  train  at  Philadelphia  for  Chicago. 
The  train  was  about  to  start,  when  the  baggage- 
master  demanded  pay  for  200  pounds  of  sur- 
plus baggage.  The  amount  was  only  $8.70, 
but  McCormick  refused  to  pay  it.  He  called  his 
family  out  of  the  train  and  ordered  that  his 
trunks  be  taken  off.  The  conductor  refused  to 
hold  the  train,  and  the  trunks  were  carried  away. 
Mr.  McCormick  at  once  saw  the  president  of 
the  railroad,  J.  Edgar  Thompson,  who  tele- 
graphed an  order  for  the  trunks  to  be  put  off 
at  Pittsburg.  The  McCormicks  set  out  for 
Chicago  by  the  next  train.  At  Pittsburg  they 
learned  that  the  trunks  had  been  carried  through 
to  Chicago.  And  the  next  day,  in  Chicago,  when 
McCormick  went  to  the  Fort  Wayne  depot,  he 
found  it  a  mass  of  smoking  cinders.  It  had 
caught  fire  in  the  night,  and  the  nine  trunks  had 
been  destroyed. 

McCormick  sued  the   railroad  for  $7,193  - 
the  value  of  the  trunks  and  their  contents.     Re- 
peatedly he   won   and   repeatedly  the   railroad 

[101] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

appealed  to  higher  courts.  After  twenty  years 
the  worn  and  battered  case  was  carried  up  to 
the  nine  Justices  of  the  United  States  Supreme 
Court.  They  decided  for  McCormick.  But 
even  then  the  railroad  evaded  payment  for  three 
years,  until  after  McCormick's  death.  Then 
the  president  of  the  road  signed  a  check  for 
$18,060.79,  which  was  the  original  value  of  the 
nine  trunks  plus  twenty-three  years'  interest. 

McCormick  did  not  for  a  moment  regard  this 
case  as  trivial.  It  involved  a  principle.  Once 
when  a  friend  bantered  him  for  fighting  so  hard 
over  a  small  matter,  he  replied,  "My  conscience, 
sir!  I  don't  know  what  would  become  of  the 
American  people  if  there  were  not  some  one  to 
stand  up  for  fair  dealing."  His  victory  did  much 
to  teach  the  railroads  better  manners  and  a  finer 
consideration  of  the  travelling  public.  Soon 
after  the  conclusion  of  the  case,  a  trunk  belong- 
ing to  a  relative  of  the  McCormicks  was  de- 
stroyed on  the  New  York  Central.  It  value  was 
$1,300,  and  one  of  the  railroad's  lawyers 
promptly  sent  a  check,  saying,  "We  don't  want 
to  have  a  lawsuit  with  the  McCormicks." 

[102] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

For  these  numerous  lawsuits  McCormick 
paid  a  terrible  price,  both  in  money  and  friend- 
ship. He  acquired  a  reputation  as  "  a  man  who 
would  law  you  to  death."  He  brought  down 
upon  himself  to  a  remarkable  degree  the  hostility 
of  his  competitors,  and  prevented  himself  from 
receiving  the  full  credit  and  prestige  that  he 
deserved.  Instead  of  being  revered  as  the  father 
of  the  Reaper  business,  he  was  feared  as  an 
industrial  Bismarck  —  a  man  of  unyielding 
will  and  indomitable  purpose,  who  regarded 
his  competitors  as  a  pack  of  trespassers  in  an 
empire  that  belonged  by  right  to  him. 

The  truth  is  that  this  situation  did  not  arise 
because  of  the  natural  perversity  of  either  Mc- 
Cormick or  his  competitors.  In  his  later  life, 
McCormick  proved  that  he  could  co-operate 
with  his  equals  in  the  most  harmonious  way,  in  a 
new  business  enterprise.  His  competitors,  too, 
were  for  the  most  part  men  of  ability  and  up- 
rightness. Neither  in  their  public  nor  private 
lives,  was  there  any  stain  upon  the  honor  of  such 
men  as  Wood,  Osborne,  Adriance,  Manny, 
Emerson,  Huntley,  Warder,  Bushnell,  Glessner, 

[103] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

Jones,  and  Lewis  Miller.  But  these  men  were 
all  newcomers.  They  were  beardless  striplings 
compared  to  McCormick.  He  had  made  and 
exhibited  a  successful  Reaper  twenty  years  be- 
fore the  first  of  them  began.  His  father  had 
grappled  with  the  problem  of  the  Reaper  before 
most  of  them  were  born.  It  was  inevitable, 
therefore,  that  there  should  have  been  an  un- 
spanable  gap  between  the  two  points  of  view. 
McCormick  stood  alone  because  he  was  alone. 
He  and  the  Reaper  had  grown  up  together  in 
long  hazardous  years  of  pioneering,  through 
ridicule  and  poverty  and  failure.  It  was  his 
dream  come  true.  And  in  the  same  spirit 
with  which  he  had  fought  to  create  it,  he  also 
fought  to  hold  it,  and  to  protect  it  from  men  to 
whom  it  was  not  a  dream  and  a  life-mission, 
but  a  mere  machine. 


[104] 


CHAPTER  VII 

THE  EVOLUTION  OF  THE  REAPER 

all  the  varieties  of  difficulties  that  con- 
fronted  Cyrus  H.  McCormick  during  his 
strenuous  life,  the  most  baffling  and  disconcert- 
ing difficulty  was  when  his  Reaper  began  to 
grow.  For  fifteen  years  —  from  1845  to  1860  — 
it  had  remained  unchanged  except  that  seats 
had  been  added  for  the  raker  and  the  driver. 
It  did  no  more  than  cut  the  grain  and  leave  it 
on  the  ground  in  loose  bundles.  It  had  abol- 
ished the  sickler  and  the  cradler;  but  there  yet 
remained  the  raker  and  the  binder.  Might  it 
not  be  possible,  thought  the  restless  American 
brain,  to  abolish  these  also  and  leave  no  one  but 
the  driver  ? 

This  at  once  became  a  most  popular  and 
fascinating  problem  for  inventors.  There  was 
by  this  time  everything  to  gain  and  nothing  to 
lose  by  improving  the  Reaper.  There  was  no 
opposition  and  no  ridicule.  To  cut  grain  by 
horse-power  had  become,  of  course,  the  only 

[105] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

proper  way  of  cutting  it.  As  many  as  20,000 
Reapers  of  all  kinds  were  made  in  1860;  and 
McCormick's  factory  had  grown  to  be  the  pride 
of  Chicago.  It  was  90  by  150  feet  in  size,  two 
stories  high,  and  gave  work  to  about  a  hundred 
and  twenty  men. 

As  early  as  1852  a  fantastic  self -rake  Reaper 
had  been  invented  by  a  mechanical  genius 
named  Jearum  Atkins.  This  man  was  a  bed- 
ridden cripple,  who,  to  while  away  the  tiresome 
hours  of  his  confinement,  bought  a  McCormick 
Reaper,  had  it  placed  outside  his  window,  and 
actually  devised  an  attachment  to  it  which 
automatically  raked  off  the  cut  grain  in  bundles. 
It  was  a  grotesque  contrivance.  The  farmers 
nicknamed  it  the  "Iron  Man."  It  consisted  of 
an  upright  post,  with  two  revolving  iron  arms. 
These  arms  whirled  stiffly  around,  windmill 
fashion,  and  scraped  the  grain  from  the  plat- 
form to  the  ground. 

An  amusing  anecdote  of  this  machine  was 
told  by  Henry  Wallace,  known  to  all  farmers  of 
the  Middle  West  as  the  founder  of  Wallace's 
Farmer.  "The  first  Reaper  that  my  father 

[106] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

bought,"  said  Mr.  Wallace,  "was  a  McCormick 
machine  that  had  an  'Iron  Man'  on  it.  The 
first  day  that  it  was  driven  into  the  grain  it 
made  such  a  clatter  that  the  horses  ran  away. 
It  was  certainly  a  terrifying  sight  as  it  rattled 
through  the  wheat,  with  its  long,  rake-fingered 
arms  flying  and  hurling  the  cut  grain  in  the 
wildest  disorder.  It  was  as  good  as  a  chariot 
race  in  a  circus  to  the  crowd  of  farmers,  wTho  had 
come  to  see  how  the  new  machine  would  operate. 
The  next  day  my  father  tried  again.  There 
had  been  rain  during  the  night,  and  the  heavy 
machine  stuck  fast  in  the  mud.  It  had  cost 
$300,  but  my  father  took  the  'Iron  Man'  off, 
and  during  the  remainder  of  that  harvest  we 
raked  off  the  grain  by  hand." 

A  great  variety  of  self-rake  Reapers  soon 
appeared,  and  after  1860  the  farmers  would  buy 
no  other  kind.  Thus  a  part  of  the  problem  had 
been  solved.  The  raker  was  abolished.  There 
now  remained  the  much  more  difficult  work  of 
supplanting  the  binder  —  the  man,  or  some- 
times woman,  who  gathered  up  the  bundles  of 
cut  grain,  and,  making  a  crude  rope  of  the  grain 

[107] 


CYRUS      HALLMcCORMICK 

itself,  bound  it  tightly  around  the  middle,  mak- 
ing what  was  called  a  sheaf.  This  was  hard, 
back-breaking  work,  intolerable  when  the  sun 
was  hot,  except  to  men  of  the  strongest  physique. 
It  required  not  strength  only,  but  skill.  Ninety- 
nine  farmers  out  of  a  hundred  believed  that  it 
would  always  have  to  be  done  by  hand.  "How 
can  it  be  possible,"  they  asked,  "that  a  machine 
which  is  being  dragged  by  horses  over  a  rough, 
field  can  at  the  same  time  be  picking  up  grain 
and  tying  knots?" 

Just  then  two  young  farmers  near  De  Kalb 
came  to  the  rescue 'by  inventing  a  new  species  of 
machine.  It  was  neither  a  Reaper  nor  a  self- 
binder.  It  was  half-way  between  the  two.  It 
was  the  missing  link.  It  appeared  that  an  in- 
ventor named  Mann  had  taken  a  McCormick 
Reaper  and  built  a  moving  platform  upon  it, 
in  such  a  way  that  the  grain  was  carried  up  to  a 
wagon  which  was  drawn  alongside.  These  two 
young  farmers  had  bought  a  Mann  machine, 
and  one  of  them,  when  he  saw  it  in  operation, 
originated  a  brilliant  idea. 

"Why  should  the  grain  be  carried  up  to  a 

[108] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

wagon?"  he  asked.  "Why  can't  we  put  a 
foot-board  on  the  machine,  for  two  of  us  to 
stand  on,  and  then  bind  the  grain  as  fast  as 
it  is  carried  up?" 

This  was  the  origin  of  the  "  Marsh  Harvester," 
which  held  the  field  for  ten  years  or  longer.  It 
did  not  abolish  the  man  who  bound,  but  it  gave 
him  a  chance  to  work  twice  as  fast.  It  com- 
pelled him  to  be  quick.  It  saved  him  the  trouble 
of  walking  from  bundle  to  bundle.  It  enabled 
him  to  stand  erect.  And  best  of  all,  it  put  half 
a  dozen  inventors  on  the  right  line  of  thought. 
Plainly,  what  was  needed  now  was  to  teach  a 
Marsh  Harvester  to  tie  knots. 

One  evening  in  1874  a  tall  man,  with  a  box 
under  his  arm,  walked  diffidently  up  the  steps 
of  the  McCormick  home  in  Chicago,  and  rang 
the  bell.  He  asked  to  see  Mr.  McCormick,  and 
was  shown  into  the  parlor,  where  he  found  ?lr. 
McCormick,  sitting  as  usual  in  a  large  and 
comfortable  chair. 

"My  name  is  Withington,"  said  the  stranger. 
"I  live  in  Janes ville,  Wisconsin.  I  have  here 
a  model  of  a  machine  that  will  automatically 

[109] 


CYRUS      HALL      M  c    C    O    R    M    I    C    K 

bind  grain."  Now,  it  so  happened  that  Me  Cor- 
mick  had  been  kept  awake  nearly  the  whole  of 
the  previous  night  by  a  stubborn  business  prob- 
lem. He  could  scarcely  hold  his  eyelids  apart. 
And  when  Withington  was  in  the  midst  of  his 
explanation,  with  the  intentness  of  a  born  in- 
ventor, McCormick  fell  fast  asleep. 

At  such  a  reception  to  his  cherished  machine, 
Withington  lost  heart.  He  was  a  gentle,  sensi- 
tive man,  easily  rebuffed,  and  so,  when  Mc- 
Cormick aroused  from  his  nap,  Withington  had 
departed  and  was  on  his  way  back  to  Wisconsin. 
For  a  few  seconds  McCormick  was  uncertain 
as  to  whether  his  visitor  had  been  a  reality  or  a 
dream.  Then  he  awoke  with  a  start  into  in- 
stant action.  A  great  opportunity  had  come 
to  him  and  he  had  let  it  slip.  He  was  at  this 
time  making  self-rake  Reapers  and  Marsh  Har- 
\  :sters ;  but  what  he  wanted  —  what  every 
Reaper  manufacturer  wanted  in  1874 — was  a 
self-binder.  He  at  once  called  to  him  one  of 
his  trusted  workmen. 

"I  want  you  to  go  to  Janesville,"  he  said. 
"Find  a  man  named  Withington,  and  bring 

mo] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

him  to  me  by  the  first  train  that  comes  back  to 
Chicago." 

The  next  day  Withington  was  brought  back 
and  treated  with  the  utmost  courtesy.  Mc- 
Cormick  studied  his  invention  and  found  it  to 
be  a  most  remarkable  mechanism.  Two  steel 
arms  caught  each  bundle  of  grain,  whirled  a 
wire  tightly  around  it,  fastened  the  two  ends 
together  with  a  twist,  cut  it  loose  and  tossed  it 
to  the  ground.  This  self-binder  was  perfect 
in  all  its  details  —  as  neat  and  effective  a  ma- 
chine as  could  be  imagined.  McCormick  was 
delighted.  At  last,  here  was  a  machine  that 
would  abolish  the  binding  of  grain  by  hand. 

A  bargain  was  made  with  Withington  on  the 
spot;  and  the  following  July  a  self-binder  was 
tried  on  the  Sherwood  farm,  near  Elgin,  Illinois. 
It  cut  fifty  acres  of  wheat  and  bound  every 
bundle  without  a  slip.  From  this  time  on- 
wards no  one  was  needed  but  a  man,  a  boy,  a 
girl,  anybody,  who  could  hold  the  reins  and 
drive  a  team  of  horses.  Of  the  ten  or  twelve 
sweating  drudges  who  toiled  in  the  harvest- 
field,  all  were  now  to  be  set  free  —  the  sicklers, 

[in] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

cradlers,  rakers,  binders  —  every  one  except 
the  driver,  and  he  (or  she)  was  to  have  the  glory 
of  riding  on  the  triumphal  chariot  of  a  machine 
that  did  all  the  work  itself. 

"There  were  ten  men  working  in  my  wheat- 
field  in  the  old  days,"  said  an  Illinois  farmer. 
"But  to-day  our  hired  girl  climbs  upon  the 
spring  seat  of  a  self-binder  and  does  the 
whole  business." 

McCormick  was  not  the  first  to  make  one  of 
these  magical  machines.  There  was  an  able 
and  enterprising  manufacturer  in  New  York 
State,  Walter  A.  Wood,  who  in  1873  had  made 
three  Withington  binder;:,  under  the  super- 
vision of  Sylvanus  D.  Locke,  who  had  been  a 
co-worker  with  Withington.  McCormick  had 
given  Wood  his  start,  as  early  as  1853,  by  selling 
him  a  license  to  make  Reapers;  and  Wood,  by 
his  high  personal  qualities,  had  built  up  a  most 
extensive  business.  But  McCormick  was  the 
first  to  make  self-binders  upon  a  large  scale. 
He  made  50,000  of  the  Withington  machines, 
and  pushed  them  with  irresistible  energy. 

He  originated  a  new  method  of  advertising 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

the  self-binders  among  the  farmers.  Special 
flat-cars  were  provided  for  him  by  the  railroads. 
Upon  each  one  of  these  cars  a  binder  was  placed, 
in  the  charge  of  an  expert.  These  cars,  during 
the  harvest  season,  were  attached  to  ordinary 
freight  trains ;  and  whenever  the  train  came  to 
a  busy  wheat-field  it  was  stopped  for  an  hour 
or  more,  the  self-binder  was  rushed  from  the 
car  to  the  field,  and  an  exhibition  of  its  skill 
given  to  the  wondering  farmers.  Then  it  was 
put  back  on  its  car,  and  the  train  resumed  its 
leisurely  course  until  it  arrived  at  the  next  scene 
of  harvesting. 

The  sensitive-natured  inventor,  Charles  B. 
Withington,  who  gave  such  timely  aid  to  Mc- 
Cormick,  was  one  of  the  most  romantic  knights- 
errant  of  industry  in  his  generation.  Born  near 
Akron  a  year  before  McCormick  invented  his 
Reaper,  he  was  trained  by  his  father  to  be  a 
watchmaker.  At  fifteen,  to  earn  some  pocket- 
money,  he  wrent  into  the  harvest  field  to  bind 
grain.  He  was  not  robust,  and  the  hard,  stoop- 
ing labor  under  a  hot  sun  would  sometimes 
bring  the  blood  to  his  head  in  a  hemorrhage. 

[113] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

There  were  times  after  the  day's  work  was 
done  when  he  was  too  weary  to  walk  home, 
and  would  throw  himself  upon  the  stubble  to 
rest. 

At  eighteen  he  set  out  to  find  his  fortune  in 
the  far  West,  became  a  Forty-niner,  drifted  to 
Australia,  and  in  1855  came  back  to  Janesville, 
Wisconsin,  with  three  thousand  dollars  or 
more  in  his  belt.  All  this  money  he  proceeded 
to  fritter  away  on  the  invention  of  a  self-rake 
Reaper  — "a  crazy  scheme,"  as  the  towns- 
people called  it.  As  it  happened,  the  whole 
southern  region  of  Wisconsin  was  being  stirred 
up  at  that  time  by  the  speeches  of  an  inventive 
Madison  editor,  who  went  by  the  name  of 
"Pump"  Carpenter.  Carpenter's  hobby  was 
that  the  binding  of  grain  must  be  done  by 
machinery.  He  was  eloquent  and  popular, 
and  his  arguments  were  substantiated  by  a  little 
model  which  he  was  accustomed  to  carry  about 
with  him.  Withington  heard  him  speak  and 
was  converted.  He  dropped  his  self-rake 
reaper  and  went  to  work  upon  a  self-binder. 
He  completed  his  first  machine  in  1872,  and 

[114] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

was  thrust  from  one  discouragement  to  another 
until  two  years  later  he  met  McCormick. 

It  is  a  most  interesting  fact,  and  certainly 
not  an  accidental  one,  that  the  group  of  noted 
inventors  who  together  produced  the  self- 
binder  all  appeared  from  the  region  south 
of  Madison,  which  had  been  so  aroused  by 
the  eloquence  of  "Pump"  Carpenter.  Besides 
C.  B.  Withington,  there  were  Sylvanus  D. 
Locke,  also  of  Janesville,  H.  A.  Holmes,  of 
Beloit,  John  F.  Appleby,  of  Mazomanie,  W. 
W.  Burson,  Jacob  Behel,  George  H.  Spauld- 
ing,  and  Marquis  L.  Gorham,  of  Rockford. 

Until  1880,  all  went  well  with  McCormick 
and  the  Withington  self-binder.  Apparently, 
the  process  of  invention  had  ceased.  The 
Reaper  had  become  of  age.  This  miraculous 
wire-twisting  machine  wras  working  everywhere 
with  clock-like  precision,  and  was  believed  to 
be  the  best  that  human  ingenuity  could  devise. 
Then,  like  a  bolt  of  lightning  from  a  blue  sky, 
came  the  news  that  William  Deering  had  made 
and  sold  3,000  twine  self-binders,  and  that  the 
farmers  had  all  at  once  become  prejudiced 

[115] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMlCK 

against  the  use  of  wire.  Wire,  they  said,  got 
mixed  with  the  straw  and  killed  their  cattle. 
Wire  fell  in  the  wheat  and  made  trouble  in  the 
flour-mills.  Wire  cut  their  hands.  Wire  clut- 
tered up  their  barn-yards.  They  would  have 
no  more  to  do  with  wire.  What  they  wanted 
and  must  have  was  twine. 

William  Deering,  the  newcomer  who  had 
caused  this  disturbance,  became  in  a  flash 
McCormick's  ablest  competitor.  He  had  en- 
tered the  business  eight  years  before  with  a  run- 
ning start,  having  been  a  successful  dry  goods 
merchant  in  Maine.  His  geneology  in  the 
harvester  industry  shows  that  he  had  become 
an  active  partner  of  E.  H.  Gammon  in  1872. 
Gammon,  who  had  formerly  been  a  Methodist 
preacher  in  Maine,  had  started  as  an  agent  for 
Seymour  and  Morgan  of  Brockport,  which 
firm  had  been  licensed  by  McCormick  in  1845. 
Deering  was  the  first  highly  skilled  business 
•man  to  enter  the  harvester  trade.  He  was  not 
a  farmer's  son,  like  McCormick.  He  was 
city-bred  and  factory  trained.  And  in  1880 
he  staked  practically  his  whole  fortune  upon 

[116] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

the  making  of  3,000  twine  self-binders,  and 
won. 

Cyrus  McCormick  saw  at  a  glance  that  the 
wire  self-binder  must  go.  It  was  his  policy  to 
give  the  farmers  what  they  wanted,  rather  than 
to  force  upon  them  an  unpopular  machine. 
So  he  called  to  his  aid  a  mechanical  genius 
named  Marquis  L.  Gorham  —  one  of  those 
who  had  been  lured  into  the  quest  of  a  self- 
binder  by  the  insistence  of  "Pump"  Carpenter. 
Gorham's  most  valuable  contribution  was  a  self- 
sizing  device,  by  which  all  bound  sheaves  were 
made  to  be  the  same  size.  By  the  time  that 
the  grain  stood  ripe  and  yellow  the  following 
season,  Gorham  had  prepared  a  twine  self- 
binder  that  worked  well,  and  McCormick, 
yielding  to  this  sudden  hostility  against  wire, 
pushed  the  Gorham  machine  with  the  full  force 
of  his  great  organization. 

This  evolution  of  the  Reaper  into  the  twine 
self-binder  was  a  momentous  event.  It  tremen- 
dously increased  the  sales.  There  were  60,000 
machines  of  all  kinds  sold  in  1880,  and  250,000 
in  1885  And  it  strikingly  decreased  the  num- 

[117] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

her  of  manufacturers.  There  were  a  hundred  or 
more  until  the  appearance  of  the  twine  binder: 
and  all  but  twenty-two  fell  out  of  the  race. 
Some  of  these  were  driven  out  by  the  expensive 
war  of  patents  that  now  ensued.  But  most  of 
them  gave  up  the  contest  for  lack  of  capital. 
The  era  of  big  production  had  arrived,  and  the 
little  hand-labor  shops  could  not  produce  an 
intricate  self-binder  for  the  low  price  at  which 
they  were  being  sold. 

Even  McCormick  lost  heavily  at  first,  before 
a  truce  was  called  in  this  battle  of  the  binders. 
One  lawsuit  cost  him  more  than  $225,000  and 
one  experiment,  with  what  was  called  a  "low- 
down"  binder,  cost  him  $80,000.  He  was  as 
determined  as  ever  not  to  be  beaten;  and  al- 
though he  was  at  this  time  over  seventy  years 
of  age,  and  sorely  crippled  by  rheumatism,  he 
straightway  entered  into  a  trade  wrar  with  Deer- 
ing,  which  was  not  ended  until  1902.  Many  of 
the  older  workmen  who  are  now  employed  in 
the  McCormick  works  can  remember  the  stress 
and  strain  of  those  battling  years,  and  how  their 
indomitable  old  leader,  at  times  when  he  was 

[118] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

unable  to  walk,  would  have  himself  pushed  in  a 
wheeled  chair  through  the  various  buildings  of 
his  immense  plant,  to  make  sure  that  every  part 
of  the  great  mechanism  was  working  smoothly. 

Of  all  the  competitors  who  had  fought  him 
in  the  early  days,  before  the  Civil  War,  there 
were  few  now  remaining.  Hussey,  his  first 
antagonist,  had  sold  out  to  a  mowing  machine 
syndicate  in  1861.  Emerson,  Seymour,  and 
Morgan  had  decided  not  to  make  self-binders. 
Jerome  Fassler,  of  Springfield,  Ohio,  took  his 
fortune  of  two  million  dollars  and  went  to  New 
York  City  in  1882  with  a  scheme  to  build  a  sub- 
way. Manny  was  dead,  and  very  few  were 
living  of  those  who  had  seen  the  Reaper  of  1831. 

John  P.  Adriance,  of  Poughkeepsie,  had  sur- 
vived. He  was  a  gentle-natured  man,  who  was 
content  with  a  small  and  safe  percentage  of  the 
business.  Byron  E.  Huntley,  of  Batavia,  had 
also  built  up  a  small,  but  solidly  based,  enter- 
prise. He  had  been  the  office-boy,  in  1845,  in 
the  factory  where  the  first  hundred  McCormick 
Reapers  were  made;  and  he  had  been  a  manu- 
facturer on  his  own  account  since  1850.  He, 

[119] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

too,  was  a  quiet,  dignified  man,  very  highly 
esteemed  in  both  the  United  States  and  Europe. 
Lewis  Miller,  who  deserves  most  credit  as  the 
creator  of  the  mower,  continued  to  do  business 
at  Akron.  Mr.  Miller  was  almost  equally  fam- 
ous as  a  Methodist  and  the  originator  of  the 
Chautauqua  idea.  At  Auburn,  N.  Y.,  David  M. 
Osborne  was  fighting  manfully  to  keep  in  the 
race.  He  had  built  seven  Reapers  as  early  as 
1856;  and  had  made  many  friends  by  his  ability 
and  uprightness.  At  Hoosick  Falls,  N.  Y., 
there  was  Walter  A.  Wood  —  a  most  competent 
and  enterprising  man;  at  Piano,  Illinois,  there 
was  William  H.  Jones  —  self-made  and  as 
honest  as  the  soil;  and  at  Springfield,  Ohio,  were 
the  picturesque  William  N.  Whiteley  and  the 
powerful  company  of  Warder,  Bushnell,  and 
Glessner.  Whiteley  was  an  inventor  who  had 
changed  a  McCormick  Reaper  into  what  he 
called  a  "combined  machine" — a  combined 
Reaper  and  mower.  And  Warder,  Bushnell, 
and  Glessner  had  begun  to  make  McCormick 
Reapers,  by  means  of  a  license  from  Seymour 
and  Morgan,  in  1852. 

[120] 


CYRUS   HALL   McCORMICK,  1858 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

Such  were  the  most  notable  men  who,  to- 
gether with  McCormick  and  Deering,  began 
in  1880  or  soon  afterwards  to  manufacture  the 
new  knot-tying  device  that  had  become  neces- 
sary to  the  Reaper.  As  for  Cyrus  H.  McCor- 
mick himself,  he  lived  to  see  it  the  universal 
grain-cutter  of  all  civilized  countries.  He  lived 
to  see  it  perfected  into  one  of  the  most  astonish- 
ing mechanisms  known  to  man  —  an  almost 
rational  machine  that  cuts  the  grain,  carries  it 
on  a  canvas  escalator  up  to  steel  hands  that 
shape  it  into  bundles,  tie  a  cord  around  it  as 
neatly  as  could  be  done  by  a  sailor,  and  cut  the 
cord ;  after  which  the  bound  sheaf  is  pushed  into 
a  basket  and  held  until  five  of  them  have  been 
collected,  whereupon  they  are  dropped  carefully 
upon  the  ground. 

Since  1884  there  has  been  no  essential  change 
in  the  fashion  of  the  self-binder.  It  is  the  same 
to-day  as  when  McCormick  was  alive.  In  the 
span  of  his  single  life  the  Reaper  was  born  and 
grew  to  its  full  maturity.  He  saw  its  Alpha  and 
its  Omega.  Best  of  all,  he  saw  not  only  its 
humble  arrival,  in  a  remote  Virginia  settlement, 

[121] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

but,  as  we  shall  see,  he  saw  it  become  the  play- 
thing of  Emperors,  the  marvel  of  Siberian  plains- 
men, the  liberator  of  the  land-serf  in  twenty 
countries,  and  the  bread-machine  of  one-half  of 
the  human  race. 


B 


CHAPTER  VIII 

THE  CONQUEST  OF  EUROPE 
Y  1850  Cyrus  H.  McCormick  was  ready  for 
new  business.  He  now  had  a  factory  of  his 
own,  and  the  assistance  of  his  brothers,  William 
and  Leander.  He  had  a  score  of  busy  agents 
and  a  few  thousand  dollars  in  the  bank.  He 
had  fought  down  the  ridicule  of  the  farm-hands. 
It  was  only  six  years  since  he  had  set  out  from 
his  Virginian  farm  with  $300  in  his  belt  and  the 
Idea  of  the  Reaper  in  his  brain;  but  in  those 
six  years  he  had  worked  mightily  and  succeeded. 
His  Reapers  were  now  clicking  merrily  in  more 
than  three  thousand  American  wheat-fields. 
So,  it  was  a  natural  thing  that  in  the  first  flush 
of  victory,  he  should  look  across  the  sea  for 
"more  worlds  to  conquer.'* 

There  was  at  that  time  no  general  demand  for 
Reapers  in  any  European  country.  Labor  was 
plentiful  and  cheap  —  forty  cents  a  day  in 
Great  Britain  and  about  half  as  much  in  Ger- 
many and  France.  In  Austria  and  Russia  the 

[123] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

farm  laborers  received  no  wages  at  all.  They 
were  serfs.  There  was  no  economic  reason  why 
serfs  should  be  replaced  by  machinery.  They 
had  first  to  become  free  and  expensive  to  employ, 
before  this  Reaper,  this  product  of  a  free  re- 
public, could  set  them  free  from  the  drudgery 
of  the  harvest. 

England  had  been  the  first  European  country 
to  abolish  this  serfdom.  Several  centuries  be- 
fore, the  ravages  of  the  Black  Death  had  made 
farm  laborers  so  scarce  that  their  rights  had 
begun  to  be  respected.  Also,  the  upgrowth  of 
the  factory  system  and  the  development  of  Eng- 
lish shipping  had  called  thousands  of  men  away 
from  the  fields,  and  raised  the  wages  of  those 
who  were  left  behind.  And  the  falling  off  in 
profits  was  compelling  many  English  land- 
owners to  study  better  methods  of  farming,  and 
to  favor  the  introduction  of  farm  machinery. 

Fortunately  for  McCormick,  he  had  no  sooner 
begun  to  think  of  foreign  trade  than  there  came 
the  famous  London  Exposition  of  1851.  This 
mammoth  Exhibition  was  to  Great  Britain 
what  the  Chicago  World's  Fair  of  1893  was  to 

[124] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

the  United  States  —  magnificent  evidence  of 
industrial  progress.  Its  main  promoter  had 
been  Prince  Albert,  the  husband  of  Queen 
Victoria,  and  its  success  gave  the  keenest  pleas- 
ure to  the  young  Queen.  In  a  letter  written 
to  the  King  of  the  Belgians,  she  thus  describes 
her  impressions  upon  the  opening  day: 

"My  dearest  Uncle,"  she  writes,  "I  wish 
you  could  have  witnessed  the  1st  May,  1851, 
the  greatest  day  in  our  history,  the  most  beauti- 
ful and  imposing  and  touching  spectacle  ever 
seen,  and  the  triumph  of  my  beloved  Albert. 
Truly  it  was  astonishing,  a  fairy  scene.  Many 
cried,  and  all  felt  touched  and  impressed  with 
devotional  feelings.  It  was  the  happiest,  proud- 
est day  in  my  life,  and  I  can  think  of  nothing 
else.  You  will  be  astounded  at  this  great  work 
when  you  see  it.  The  beauty  of  the  building 
and  the  vastness  of  it  all!" 

The  crowning  jewel  of  this  Exposition  was 
the  priceless  Koh-i-noor  diamond,  which  the 
Queen  had  received  from  India  the  previous 
year,  and  had  loaned  to  the  Exposition  managers. 
For  five  thousand  years,  so  the  legend  ran,  this 

[125] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

diamond  had  been  one  of  the  most  precious 
treasures  of  Asia.  It  had  been  worn  by  the 
hero  Kama.  And  it  had  been  so  often  the 
most  coveted  prize  in  war  that  there  was 
a  Hindoo  saying  — "  Whoever  possesses  the 
Koh-i-noor  has  conquered  his  enemies." 

Most  of  the  courts  of  Europe  had  sent  some 
dazzling  treasure.  There  were  tapestries  from 
the  Viceroy  of  Egypt,  and  rugs  from  the  Sultan 
of  Turkey,  and  silks  from  the  King  of  Spain. 
There  were  marbles  from  Paris,  and  paintings 
from  Dresden,  and  embroideries  from  Vienna. 
And  in  the  midst  of  this  resplendent  Ex- 
position, surrounded  and  outshone  by  the 
exhibits  of  Russia,  Austria,  and  France,  lay 
a  shabby  collection  of  odds  and  ends  from 
the  United  States. 

For  three  weeks  the  American  department 
was  the  joke  of  the  Exposition.  It  was  nick- 
named the  "  Prairie  Ground."  It  had  no  jewels, 
nor  silks,  nor  golden  candelabra.  There  were 
only  such  preposterous  things  as  Dick's  Press, 
Borden's  Meat  Biscuit,  St.  John's  Soap,  and 
McCormick's  Reaper.  This  last  contraption 

[126] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

was  the  most  preposterous  of  all.  It  was  said 
to  be  "a  cross  between  an  Astley  chariot,  a 
wheelbarrow,  and  a  flying-machine."  It  was 
unlike  anything  else  that  English  eyes  had  ever 
seen,  and  by  all  odds  the  queerest  and  most 
ungainly  thing  that  lay  under  the  glass  roof  of 
the  Crystal  Palace.  Undeniably  it  was  the 
"Ugly  Duckling"  of  the  American  exhibit. 

But  one  day  there  came  to  the  Reaper  booth  a 
remarkable  Anglo-Italian  named  John  J.  Mechi. 
His  father  had  been  the  barber  of  George  III., 
and  he  himself,  by  the  invention  of  a  "Magic 
Razor  Strop,"  had  made  a  fortune.  His  hobby 
was  scientific  farming,  and  he  was  hungry  for 
new  methods  and  new  ideas.  At  the  time  of 
the  Exposition,  his  farm,  which  lay  not  far 
from  London,  had  become  the  most  famous 
experimental  ground  in  England.  Therefore, 
when  he  spied  this  new  contrivance  called  a 
Reaper,  he  proposed  that  it  be  taken  out  to  his 
farm  and  put  to  the  test. 

This  was  done  on  July  twenty-fourth.  In 
spite  of  a  pouring  rain,  there  were  present  a 
group  of  judges  and  two  hundred  farmers.  Lord 

[127] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

Ebrington  was  there,  and  Prince  Frederick  of 
Holstein,  and  several  other  titled  agriculturists. 
One  other  machine  was  to  be  tested,  besides  Mc- 
Cormick's.  It  was  put  into  the  grain  first  and 
was  at  once  seen  to  be  a  failure.  It  broke  down 
the  grain  instead  of  cutting  it.  Seeing  this  mis- 
hap, several  of  the  farmers  said  to  Mr.  Mechi, 
'You  had  better  stop  this  trial,  because  it  is 
destroying  your  grain."  Whereupon  Mr.  Mechi 
made  one  of  the  noblest  replies  that  can  be 
found  in  the  annals  of  progress.  "Gentlemen," 
he  said,  "this  is  a  great  experiment  for  the 
benefit  of  my  country.  When  a  new  principle 
is  about  to  be  established,  individual  interests 
must  always  give  way.  If  it  is  necessary  for 
the  success  of  this  test,  you  may  take  my 
seventy  acres  of  wheat." 

Then  came  the  McCormick  Reaper,  driven 
by  an  expert  named  Mackenzie.  It  swept  down 
the  field  like  a  chariot  of  war,  with  whirling  reel 
and  clattering  blade  —  seventy-four  yards  in 
seventy  seconds.  It  was  a  miracle.  Such  a 
thing  had  never  before  been  seen  by  Europeans. 
"This  is  a  triumph  for  the  American  Reaper," 

[128] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

said  the  delighted  Mechi.  "It  has  done  its 
work  completely;  and  the  day  will  come  when 
this  machine  will  cut  all  the  grain  in  England. 
Now,"  he  continued,  swinging  his  hat,  "let  us, 
as  Englishmen,  show  our  appreciation  by  giv- 
ing three  hearty  English  cheers." 

Horace  Greeley,  who  was  present  on  this 
occasion,  described  the  victory  of  the  McCormick 
Reaper  as  follows :  —  "It  came  into  the  field 
to  confront  a  tribunal  already  prepared  for  its 
condemnation.  Before  it  stood  John  Bull  — 
burly,  dogged,  and  determined  not  to  be  hum- 
bugged,--his  judgment  made  up  and  his  sen- 
tence ready  to  be  recorded.  There  was  a  mo- 
ment, and  but  a  moment,  of  suspense;  then 
human  prejudice  could  hold  out  no  longer; 
and  burst  after  burst  of  involuntary  cheers  from 
the  whole  crowd  proclaimed  the  triumph  of  the 
Yankee  Reaper.  In  seventy  seconds  McCor- 
mick had  become  famous.  He  was  the  lion  of 
the  hour;  and  had  he  brought  five  hundred 
Reapers  with  him,  he  could  have  sold  them  all." 

Suddenly  the  "Ugly  Duckling"  had  become 
a  swan.  The  glory  of  the  Reaper  began  to 

[129] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

• 

rival  that  of  the  Koh-i-noor.  McCormick  was 
given  not  only  a  First  Prize  but  a  Council  Medal, 
such  as  was  usually  awarded  only  to  Kings  and 
Governments.  The  London  Times,  which  had 
led  the  jeering,  became  now  the  loudest  in  the 
chorus  of  approval.  "The  Reaping  machine 
from  the  United  States,"  said  the  Times  editor, 
"is  the  most  valuable  contribution  from  abroad, 
to  the  stock  of  our  previous  knowledge,  that  we 
have  yet  discovered.  It  is  worth  the  whole  cost 
of  the  Exposition."  Also,  speaking  on  behalf 
of  the  English  people,  Sir  Henry  Lytton  Bulwer 
said,  "For  all  manly  and  practical  purposes,  the 
place  of  the  United  States  is  at  the  head  of  the 
poll.  Where,  out  of  America,  shall  we  get  a 
pistol  like  Mr.  Colt's,  to  kill  our  eight  enemies 
in  a  second,  or  a  reaping  machine  like  Mr. 
McCormick's,  to  clear  out  twenty  acres  of 
wheat  in  a  day?" 

On  the  whole,  this  Exposition  gave  the  United 
States  its  first  opportunity  to  answer  the  un- 
pleasant questions  that  Sidney  Smith  had 
asked  in  1820.  What  have  the  Americans  done, 
he  had  asked,  for  the  arts  and  sciences  ?  Where 

[130] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

are  their  Arkwrights,  their  Watts,  their  Davys  ? 
Here  he  was  answered  by  the  McCormick 
Reaper,  the  Colt  revolver,  the  Hobbs  lock,  the 
Morse  telegraph,  the  Howe  sewing-machine, 
the  Deere  plow,  and  the  Hoe  press.  And,  as 
if  to  make  the  triumph  of  American  invention 
complete,  it  was  in  this  year  that  the 
yacht  America  easily  out-classed  the  famous 
yachts  of  England  in  a  great  race  at  Cowes, 
and  that  the  American  steamer  Baltic,  of 
the  Collins  Line,  broke  all  th?  ocean  records 
and  became  the  speediest  vessel  on  the  high  seas. 
This  Exposition  did  much  for  McCormick. 
It  was  the  first  appreciation  of  his  work,  in  a 
large  way,  that  he  had  received.  It  was  a  wel- 
come change  after  twenty  strenuous  years.  It 
gave  him  the  distinction  that  a  naturally  strong 
nature  craved,  and  secured  the  friendship  of 
such  eminent  men  as  Junius  Morgan,  George 
Peabody,  J.  J.  Mechi,  and  Lord  Granville. 
From  a  business  point  of  view,  also,  the  Expo- 
sition was  of  great  service  to  McCormick.  It 
enabled  him  to  draw  up  a  new  plan  of  cam- 
paign for  the  foreign  trade. 

[LSI] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

In  the  United  States,  he  had  made  his  appeal 
directly  to  the  mass  of  the  farmers.  In  Europe 
he  could  not  do  this.  The  vast  bulk  of  the 
farmers  here  were  tenants  or  serfs.  But  it  was 
also  true,  he  observed,  that  the  Kings  of  Europe, 
and  the  members  of  the  nobility,  were  land- 
owners. Here  was  his  chance.  He  would  be- 
gin at  the  top.  He  would  sell  his  Reapers  to 
the  kings. 

He  noticed  that  kings  and  queens  were  not 
the  remote  and  inaccessible  personages  that  he 
had  believed  them  to  be.  Prince  Albert  was 
plainly  more  interested  in  farm  machinery  than 
in  the  Koh-i-noor.  The  one  prize  which  was 
awarded  to  him  personally  was  for  a  model 
cottage,  in  which  a  workingman's  family  might 
live  with  greater  comfort.  And  one  morning, 
while  McCormick  was  giving  attention  to  his 
Reaper,  the  Queen  and  her  ten-year-old  son 
(now  the  King  of  England)  walked  past  and 
had  a  view  of  the  American  Reaping  machine 
that  had  been  so  widely  ridiculed  and  praised. 

McCormick  had  to  hurry  back  to  the  United 


[182 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

States,  on  account  of  a  patent  suit  that  was  then 
in  full  swing;  but  before  he  left  England  he 
established  an  agency  in  London,  and  started 
a  vigorous  campaign  among  the  titled  land- 
owners. He  prepared  a  statement,  showing 
that  even  at  the  low  rate  of  wages  that  were  paid 
on  English  farms  a  Reaper  would  mean  a  hand- 
some saving  to  English  wheat-growers.  But  he 
did  not  depend  upon  the  argument  of  economy. 
He  placed  his  reliance  also  upon  the  fact  that 
the  Reaper  had  become  the  playtoy  of  kings, 
and  that  their  fancy  would  presently  make  it 
the  fashion. 

Four  years  later  he  went  with  another  Reaper 
to  an  Exposition  at  Paris,  won  the  Gold  Medal, 
and  sold  his  machine  to  the  Emperor.  Then, 
in  1862,  with  his  wife  and  young  son  and 
daughter,  he  made  his  headquarters  in  London, 
and  opened  up  a  two-years'  campaign  in  Great 
Britain,  Germany,  and  France.  Up  to  this 
time  the  foreign  trade  had  grown  but  slowly. 
All  European  countries  combined  were  not  buy- 
ing more  than  half  a  million  dollars'  worth  of 


[133 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

farm  machinery  a  year  from  Americans  —  less 
than  we  sell  them  now  in  five  days.  So  Mc- 
Cormick  exerted  himself  to  the  utmost. 

He  held  field  tests  to  awaken  the  farmers. 
He  advertised  and  organized.  There  were 
now  several  dozen  other  manufacturers  in  the 
field,  all  making  Reapers  more  or  less  like  Mc- 
Cormick's;  and  he  gave  battle  to  them  at  Lon- 
don, Lille,  and  Hamburg.  After  the  Hamburg 
contest,  Joseph  A.  Wright,  the  United  States 
Commissioner,  cabled  to  New  York:  "McCor- 
mick  has  thrashed  all  nations  and  walked  off 
with  the  Gold  Medal." 

Again,  in  1867,  McCormick  had  a  notable 
time  at  Paris.  The  Emperor  Napoleon  III., 
then  in  the  last  days  of  his  inherited  glory, 
permitted  McCormick  to  give  a  sort  of  Reaper 
matinee  on  the  royal  estate  at  Chalons.  The 
Emperor  was  present,  at  first  on  horseback, 
and  then  on  foot.  The  sun  was  hot,  and  pres- 
ently he  said  to  McCormick,  "If  you  will  allow 
me,  I'll  come  under  your  umbrella."  So  the 
two  men,  dramatically  different  in  the  tendencies 
they  represented,  walked  arm  in  arm  behind 

[134] 


HIS         LIFI        AND         WORK 

the  Reaper,  and  watched  it  automatically  cut 
and  rake  off  the  grain.  The  Emperor  was 
delighted.  He  forgot  for  the  moment  his  im- 
pending troubles,  and  at  once  offered  Mc- 
Cormick  the  Cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honor. 
This  was,  in  all  probability,  the  last  time  that 
the  coveted  Cross  was  conferred  in  France  by 
the  hand  of  a  sovereign;  and  the  meeting  of  the 
two  men  was  a  highly  impressive  event,  the  one 
man  typifying  a  falling  dynasty  that  had  risen 
to  greatness  by  the  sword,  and  the  other  the 
founder  of  a  new  industry  that  was  destined  to 
bring  peace  and  plenty  to  all  nations  alike. 

Two  years  later,  because  of  the  clamor  of 
McCormick's  competitors,  a  grand  Field  Test 
was  arranged  by  the  German  Government  at 
Altenberg.  Thirty-eight  contestants  entered 
the  lists,  and  after  a  most  exciting  tournament 
the  judges  awarded  the  Gold  Medal  and  a 
special  prize  of  sixty  ducats  to  McCormick. 
Such  contests,  from  this  time  onward,  came 
thick  and  fast.  Several  days  later  McCormick 
swept  the  field  at  Altona.  In  1873  he  was 
decorated  by  the  Austrian  Emperor.  And  in 

[18*] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

1878  the  French  Academy  of  Science  elected 
him  a  member,  for  the  reason  that  he  "had 
done  more  for  the  cause  of  agriculture  than 
any  other  living  man." 

From  that  time  to  the  present  day  the  making 
of  Reapers  and  Harvesters  has  remained  an 
American  business.  An  American  machine 
must  pay  twenty  dollars  to  enter  France,  and 
twenty-five  to  enter  Hungary.  But  try  as  they 
may,  other  nations  cannot  learn  the  secret  of 
the  Reaper.  They  cannot  produce  a  machine 
that  is  at  once  so  complex,  so  hardy,  and  so 
efficient.  When  Bismarck,  at  the  close  of  his 
life,  was  inspecting  several  American  self- 
binders  which  he  had  bought  for  his  farm  at 
Fredericksruhe,  he  asked,  "Why  do  they  not 
make  these  machines  in  Germany?"  As  we 
have  seen,  had  he  wished  a  complete  answer  he 
would  have  had  to  read  the  history  of  the 
United  States.  He  would  have  seen  that  the 
Reaper  can  be  produced  only  in  countries  where 
labor  receives  a  high  reward,  where  farmers 
own  their  own  acres  without  fear  of  being  de- 
spoiled by  invading  armies,  and  where  the 

[136] 


CYRUS  HALL  McCORMICK,  1867 
From  Paintingr  by  Cabanel 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

average  of  intelligence  and  enterprise  is  as 
high  in  the  country  as  in  the  city. 

In  1898  Europe  had  become  so  dependent 
upon  America  for  its  reaping  machinery  that 
22,000  machines  were  shipped  from  the  Mc- 
Cormick  plant  alone  —  so  many  that  a  fleet 
of  twelve  vessels  had  to  be  chartered  to  carry 
them.  There  are  now  as  many  American 
Reapers  and  Harvesters  in  Europe  as  can  do 
the  work  of  12,000,000  men.  Of  all  American 
machines  exported,  the  Reaper  is  at  the  head 
of  the  list.  It  has  been  the  chief  pathfinder 
for  our  foreign  trade.  Four-fifths  of  all  the 
harvesting  machinery  in  the  world  is  made  in 
the  United  States;  and  one-third,  perhaps 
more,  in  the  immense  factory-city  that  Cyrus 
H.  McCormick  founded  in  Chicago  in  1847. 

It  was  McCormick's  most  solid  satisfaction, 
in  his  later  life,  to  see  foreign  nations,  one  by 
one,  adopt  his  invention  and  move  up  out  of 
the  Famine  Zone.  No  news  was  at  any  time 
more  welcome  to  him  than  the  tidings  that  a 
new  territory  had  been  entered.  And  although 
the  foreign  trade  has  been  vastly  multiplied  in 

[137] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

the  past  five  or  six  years,  he  lived  long  enough  to 
see  his  catalogue  printed  in  twenty  languages, 
and  to  know  that  as  long  as  the  human  race 
continued  to  eat  bread,  the  sun  would  never 
set  upon  the  empire  of  the  Reaper. 


i 


CHAPTER  IX 

McCORMICK  AS  A   MANUFACTURER 

F  I  had  given  up  business,  I  would  have 
been  dead  long  ago,"  said  Cyrus  H.  Mc- 
Cormick  in  1884,  only  a  few  weeks  before  his 
death;  and  this  statement  was  by  no  means  an 
exaggeration.  His  business  was  his  life.  It 
was  not  a  definite,  walled-off  fraction  of  his  life, 
as  with  most  men.  It  was  the  whole  of  it.  His 
business  was  his  work,  his  play,  his  religion,  his 
grand  opera,  his  education.  There  was  business 
even  in  his  love-letters  and  his  dreams. 

McCormick  believed  in  business.  He  had 
the  sturdy  pride  of  a  "John  Halifax,  Gentle- 
man." He  never  wanted  to  be  anything  else 
but  a  worker.  He  never  wasted  a  breath  in 
wishing  for  an  easier  life.  He  worked  hard  for 
twenty-five  years  after  he  had  made  his  fortune, 
because  he  believed  in  work  and  commerce  and 
the  reciprocities  of  trade.  He  was  never  dazzled 
nor  deflected  for  a  moment  by  the  pomps  and 
pageantries  of  the  world,  and  for  the  glory  that 

[139] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

springs  from  war  he  had  very  little  respect.  In 
1847,  when  offering  a  place  in  his  factory  to  his 
brother  Leander,  he  writes,  "This  will  be  as 
honorable  an  enterprise  as  to  go  to  Mexico  to 
be  shot  at."  And  in  later  life,  in  a  conversation 
with  General  Lilley,  of  Virginia,  he  said,  "I 
expect  to  die  in  the  harness,  because  this  is  not 
the  world  for  rest.  This  is  the  world  for  work. 
In  the  next  world  we  will  have  the  rest." 

In  the  vast  mass  of  letters,  papers,  etc.,  left 
by  Mr.  McCormick,  there  is  one  mention,  and 
only  one,  of  recreation.  After  his  first  visit  to 
the  West,  in  1844,  he  wrote  to  one  of  his  brothers 
and  described  a  hunting  trip  in  which  he  shot 
three  prairie  chickens  near  Beloit.  But  during 
the  rest  of  his  life,  he  was  too  busy  for  sport. 
His  energy  was  the  wonder  of  his  friends  and 
the  despair  of  his  employees.  His  brain  was 
not  quick.  It  was  not  marvellously  keen  nor 
marvellously  intuitive.  But  it  was  at  work 
every  waking  moment,  like  a  great  engine  that 
never  tires. 

"He  was  the  most  laborious  worker  I  ever 
saw,"  said  one  of  his  secretaries.  One  of  the 

[140] 


HIS          LIFE         AND          WORK 

words  that  annoyed  him  most  was  to-morrow. 
He  wanted  things  done  to-day.  With  regard 
to  every  important  piece  of  work,  it  was  his 
instinct  to  "do  it  now."  He  abhorred  delay 
and  dawdling.  Even  as  a  boy,  when  sent  on 
an  errand,  he  would  set  off  upon  a  run.  Walk- 
ing was  too  slow.  And  although  he  was  in 
France  on  many  occasions,  the  French  phrase 
that  he  knew  best  was  "Depechez-vous." 

His  plan  of  work,  so  far  as  he  could  be  said 
to  have  a  plan,  was  this  —  One  Thing  at  a  Time, 
and  the  Hardest  Thing  First.  He  followed  the 
line  of  most  resistance.  If  the  hardest  thing 
can  be  done,  he  reasoned,  all  the  rest  will  follow. 
And  as  for  all  work  that  was  merely  routine, 
he  left  as  much  as  possible  of  it  to  others. 

He  was  not  an  organizer  so  much  as  a  creator 
and  a  pioneer.  His  problem  was  not  like  that 
which  troubles  the  business  men  of  to-day.  He 
was  not  grappling  with  the  evils  of  competition, 
nor  with  the  higher  questions  of  efficiency  and 
"community  of  interest."  He  was  making  a 
business  that  had  not  existed.  He  was  clearing 
away  obstacles  that  are  now  wholly  forgotten. 

[141] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

Consequently,  as  each  new  difficulty  appeared, 
he  had  to  consider  it  in  all  its  details.  He 
could  not  pass  it  over  to  Lieutenant  Number 
One  or  Lieutenant  Number  Two. 

McCormick  was  like  a  general  who  was  lead- 
ing an  army  into  an  unknown  country  rather 
than  like  the  business  man  of  the  twentieth  cen- 
tury, who  can  travel  by  time-table  and  schedule. 
When  an  obstacle  blocked  his  path,  it  had  to  be 
removed ;  and  until  it  was  out  of  the  way,  noth- 
ing else  mattered.  Thus  it  was  impossible  for 
McCormick  to  have  business  hours.  Once  his 
mind  had  applied  itself  to  a  problem,  he  cared 
nothing  for  clocks  and  watches.  Sometimes  he 
would  work  on  through  the  night,  hour  after 
hour,  until  the  gray  light  of  another  day  shone 
in  the  window.  On  all  these  arduous  occasions, 
he  had  no  idea  of  time,  and  he  would  allow  no 
distractions  nor  interruptions.  So  rigid  was 
this  grasp  of  his  mind  that  if  his  body  rebelled 
and  he  fell  asleep,  he  would  invariably  when 
he  woke  take  up  the  matter  in  hand  at  the 
exact  point  at  which  it  had  been  left.  Not  even 


14* 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

sleep  could  detach  his  mind  from  a  task  that 
was  unfinished. 

When  anything  was  going  well,  he  let  it  alone. 
As  soon  as  his  factory  was  in  good  running  order, 
he  gave  it  little  attention.  It  was  managed  first 
by  his  brothers,  William  and  Leander,  and 
afterwards  by  such  thoroughly  competent  men 
as  Charles  Spring  and  E.  K.  Butler.  The  work 
that  he  chose  to  do  himself  was  invariably  new 
business.  He  cared  little  for  the  mere  making 
of  money.  The  success  always  pleased  him 
much  more  than  the  profit.  He  was  at  heart 
a  builder,  and  therefore  when  he  had  finished 
one  structure,  he  moved  off  and  began  another. 

It  is  a  remarkable  fact  that  as  an  investor, 
also,  he  had  no  interest  in  businesses  that  were 
already  established.  Stocks  were  offered  to  him, 
stocks  that  were  safe  and  sure,  but  he  bought 
none  of  them.  The  money  that  he  invested  out- 
side of  his  own  business  was  put  into  pioneering 
enterprises.  He  bought  land  in  Chicago  and 
Arizona.  He  opened  up  gold  mines  in  South 
Carolina  and  Montana.  He  supplied  the  capital 


CYRUS      HALL     McCORMICK 

for  a  company  which  set  out  to  bring  mahogany 
from  San  Domingo.  He  invested  $55,000  in 
the  Tehuantepec  Inter-Ocean  Railroad,  an  am- 
bitious attempt  to  join  the  Atlantic  and  Pacific 
oceans  by  rail,  which  was  begun  in  1879  and 
came  to  an  inglorious  end  several  years  later. 
And  he  was  one  of  that  daring  group  of  Amer- 
icans who  planned  and  financed  the  Union 
Pacific  Railway  —  the  first  road  that  really 
joined  sea  to  sea  and  reached  to  the  farthest 
acre  in  the  West. 

In  all  these  undertakings  he  lost  money,  except 
in  the  instances  of  Chicago  real  estate  and  the 
Union  Pacific.  By  1883  he  had  several  hun: 
dred  thousand  dollars  invested  in  gold  mines, 
and  yet  had  not  received  one  dollar  of  profit. 
It  was  the  fascination  of  pioneering  that  had 
lured  him.  He  saw  no  charm,  as  the  gambler 
does,  in  the  risk  itself.  The  Wall  Street  game 
he  regarded  as  child's  play.  The  thing  that 
gripped  him  was  the  developing  of  new  material 
resources  —  the  colonization  of  new  lands  — 
the  mastery  of  whatever  is  hostile  to  the  welfare 
of  the  human  race. 

[144] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

Another  McCormick  trait,  which  is  not  usually 
found  in  men  who  have  the  pioneering  instinct, 
was  Thoroughness.  He  never  said,  "This  is 
good  enough,"  or  "Half  a  loaf  is  better  than  no 
bread."  He  wanted  what  was  right  whether 
it  came  to  him  or  went  from  him.  He  never 
believed  in  a  ninety  per  cent  success.  He  wanted 
par.  Once  his  mind  was  fully  aroused  upon  a 
subject,  there  was  no  detail  too  petty  for  him  to 
consider.  He  labored  hard  to  be  correct  in 
matters  that  appeared  trifling  to  other  men. 
Even  in  his  letters  to  members  of  his  family,  the 
sentences  were  carefully  formed,  and  there  were 
no  misspelled  words.  Once  he  gave  advice  to 
a  younger  brother  on  the  importance  of  spelling 
words  correctly.  "You  should  carry  a  diction- 
ary, as  I  do,"  he  said. 

All  slovenliness,  whether  of  mind  or  body,  he 
abhorred.  To  take  thought  about  a  matter 
and  to  do  it  as  it  ought  to  be  done,  was  to  him 
a  matter  of  character  as  well  as  of  business. 
When  a  telegram  was  submitted  to  him  for 
approval,  it  was  his  custom  to  draw  a  circle 
around  the  superfluous  words.  This  was  a 

[145] 


CYBUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

little  lesson  to  his  managers  on  the  importance 
of  brevity  and  exactness.  He  insisted  that  clocks 
and  watches  should  be  correct,  and  in  his  later 
life  carried  a  fine  repeater  which  could  strike 
the  hour  in  the  night  and  in  which  he  took  an 
almost  boyish  pride.  Once,  when  he  had  been 
given  the  management  of  a  political  campaign 
in  Chicago,  he  created  consternation  among 
the  politicians  by  the  rigid  way  in  which  he 
supervised  the  expense  accounts.  "This  will 
never  do,"  he  said.  "Things  are  at  loose  ends." 
If  a  bill  was  ten  cents  too  much  it  went  back. 
One  bill  for  $15  was  held  up  for  a  week  be- 
cause it  was  not  properly  drawn.  The  amazed 
politicians  could  not  understand  such  a  man, 
—  who  would  readily  sign  a  check  for  $10,- 
000,  and  put  it  in  the  campaign  treasury,  and 
yet  make  trouble  about  the  misplacing  of  a 
dime  of  other  people's  money. 

McCormick  demanded  absolute  honesty  from 
his  employees.  One  young  man  lost  his  chance 
of  promotion  because  he  was  seen  to  place  a 
two-cent  stamp,  belonging  to  the  firm,  on  one 
of  his  personal  letters.  But  once  he  had  tested 

[146] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

a  man,  and  found  him  to  be  pure  gold,  he  trusted 
him  completely.  A  new  employee  would  be 
pelted  with  questions  and  complete  answers 
insisted  upon.  This  was  often  a  harsh  ordeal. 
It  was  irritating  to  a  man  of  independent  spirit, 
until  he  realized  that  it  was  a  sort  of  discipline 
and  examination. 

McCormick  was  always  an  optimist.  He 
was  not  one  of  those  who  said,  "  Let  well  enough 
alone." 

He  never  endured  unsatisfactory  business 
conditions.  When  he  found  that  the  freight 
charges  on  Reapers  from  Virginia  to  Cincinnati 
were  too  high,  he  arranged  to  have  Reapers 
built  in  Cincinnati.  When  he  found  that  other 
manufacturers  were  apt  to  be  careless  as  to  the 
quality  of  their  materials,  he  built  a  factory  of 
his  own.  Again  and  again  in  the  course  of  his 
life,  came  the  temptation  to  be  satisfied  with 
what  he  had  already  achieved.  But  he  could 
not  endure  the  thought  of  being  beaten.  In- 
stead of  being  content  and  complacent,  he  was 
far  more  likely  to  be  planning  a  wholly  new 
policy,  on  larger  lines. 

[147] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

A  daring  proposition  from  a  competent  man 
always  caught  his  attention.  Once,  when  he 
was  sitting  in  his  office,  he  heard  E.  K.  Butler, 
who  was  at  that  time  the  head  of  his  sales  de- 
partment, protest  that  the  factory  was  not  mak- 
ing as  many  machines  as  it  should.  "  It  is  sheer 
nonsense,"  said  Butler,  "to  say  that  the  factory 
is  producing  as  much  as  it  can.  If  I  were  at 
the  head  of  it,  I  could  double  the  output  with 
very  little  extra  expense."  Most  employers 
would  have  regarded  this  sort  of  talk  as  mere 
boastfulness,  but  not  so  McCormick.  He  knew 
that  Butler  was  a  most  adaptable  and  competent 
man,  so  he  called  him  into  the  office  and  straight- 
way appointed  him  to  be  the  superintendent  of 
the  factory.  Butler  was  thus  put  upon  his 
mettle.  He  went  out  to  the  factory  resolved 
that  McCormick's  confidence  in  him  should  not 
be  overthrown.  He  routed  the  wastes  and  in- 
efficiencies, and  keyed  the  whole  plant  up  to 
such  a  pitch  that,  in  a  remarkably  short  period, 
he  had  made  good  his  boast  and  doubled  the 
output  without  hiring  an  extra  man. 

But  the  preeminent  quality  in  the  character 

[148] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

of  Cyrus  McCormick  was  not  his  power  of  con- 
centration, nor  his  spirit  of  pioneering,  nor  his 
thoroughness.  It  was  his  strength  of  will  — 
his  Tenacity.  This  was  the  motif  of  his  life. 

He  was  not  at  all  a  shrewd  accumulator  of 
millions,  as  many  have  imagined  him.  He  had 
not  an  iota  of  craft  and  cunning.  Neither  was 
he  a  financier,  in  the  modern  sense.  It  would 
be  nearer  the  truth  to  say  that  he  was  a  farmer- 
manufacturer,  of  simple  nature  but  tremendous 
resolution,  whose  one  overmastering  life-pur- 
pose was  to  teach  the  wheat  nations  of  the  world 
to  use  his  harvesting  machinery. 

"The  exhibition  of  his  powerful  will  was  at 
times  actually  terrible,"  said  one  of  his  lawyers. 
"If  any  other  man  on  this  earth  ever  had  such 
a  will,  certainly  I  have  not  heard  of  it." 

A  drizzle  of  little  annoyances  and  little  mat- 
ters always  irritated  him,  but  he  could  stand 
up  alone  against  a  sea  of  adversity  without  a 
whimper.  In  fact,  he  would  sooner  be  asked 
for  a  thousand  dollars  than  for  fifty  cents.  He 
would  storm  over  the  loss  of  a  carpet  slipper 
and  smile  blandly  at  the  loss  of  a  lawsuit.  "  He 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

made  more  fuss  over  a  pin-prick,"  said  one  of 
his  valets,  "than  he  did  over  a  surgical  opera- 
tion." He  disliked  the  petty  odds  and  ends  of 
life.  His  mind  was  too  massive  to  adapt  itself 
readily  to  small  matters.-  But  when  a  great 
difficulty  came  in  view,  he  rose  and  went  at  it 
with  a  sort  of  stern  satisfaction  and  religious 
zeal.  He  was  so  confident  of  his  own  strength, 
and  of  the  justice  of  his  cause,  that  it  was  al- 
most a  joy  to  him  to  — 

**  Breast  the  blows  of  circumstance, 
And  grasp  the  skirts  of  happy  chance, 
And  grapple  with  his  evil  star." 

A  defeat  never  meant  anything  more  to 
McCormick  than  a  delay.  Often,  the  harder  he 
was  thrown  down  the  higher  he  would  rebound. 
Again  and  again  he  was  thwarted  and  blocked. 
In  the  race  of  competition,  there  was  a  time  when 
he  was  beaten  by  Whiteley,  and  there  was  a 
time  when  he  was  beaten  by  Deering.  Most 
of  his  lawsuits  were  decided  against  him.  But 
no  one  ever  saw  him  crushed  or  really  disheart- 
ened. In  1877,  after  he  had  made  a  long  hard 
struggle  to  become  a  United  States  Senator, 

[150] 


OF  THE 

UNIVERSITY 

or 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

the  news  came  to  him  that  he  was  defeated. 
"Well,"  he  said,  "that's  over.  What  next?" 

Usually,  McCormick  was  at  his  best  when 
the  situation  was  at  its  worst.  His  Titanic  work 
immediately  after  the  great  Chicago  Fire  of  1871 
is  the  most  striking  evidence  of  this.  He  had 
been  living  at  the  corner  of  Tenth  Street  and 
Fifth  Avenue,  in  New  York  City,  for  four  years 
before  the  Fire;  but  he  was  in  Chicago  during 
the  greatest  of  all  Illinois  disasters.  In  one  day 
of  fire  and  terror  he  saw  his  city  reduced  to  a 
waste  of  ashes.  It  was  no  longer  a  city.  It 
was  two  thousand  acres  of  desolation.  He  was 
himself  in  the  midst  of  the  fire-fighting.  When 
his  wife,  in  response  to  his  telegraphic  message, 
came  to  him  in  Chicago  two  days  later,  he  met 
her  wearing  a  half-burned  hat  and  a  half- 
burned  overcoat.  His  big  factory,  which  was  at 
that  time  making  about  10,000  harvesters  a 
year,  was  wholly  destroyed.  In  a  flash  he  found 
himself  without  a  city  and  without  a  business. 

But  McCormick  never  flinched.  The  arrival 
of  a  great  difficulty  was  always  his  cue.  First 
he  ascertained  his  wife's  wishes.  Did  she  wish 

[151] 


CYEUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

the  factory  to  be  rebuilt,  or  did  she  want  him 
to  retire  from  active  business  life  ?  She,  think- 
ing of  her  son,  said  —  "Rebuild."  At  once 
McCormick  became  the  most  buoyant  and 
confident  citizen  in  the  ruined  city.  His  great 
spirit  was  aroused.  He  called  up  one  of  his 
attorneys  and  sent  him  in  haste  to  the  docks  to 
buy  lumber.  He  telegraphed  to  his  agents  to 
rush  in  as  much  money  as  they  could  collect. 
Every  bank  in  the  city  had  been  burned,  so  for 
a  time  this  money  was  kept  by  the  cashier  in  a 
market  basket,  and  carried  at  night  to  a  private 
house.  There  was  one  day  as  much  as  $24,000 
in  the  basket.  Before  the  cinders  were  cool, 
McCormick  had  given  orders  to  build  a  new 
factory,  larger  than  the  one  that  had  been 
burned  down.  More  than  this,  he  had  also 
given  orders  that  his  house  in  New  York  should 
be  sold,  and  that  a  home  should  be  established 
in  Chicago.  Chicago  was  his  city.  He  had 
seen  it  grow  from  10,000  to  325,000.  And  in 
this  hour  of  its  distress  he  tossed  aside  all  other 
plans  and  gave  Chicago  all  he  had. 

His  unconquerableness  gave  heart  to  others. 

[152] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

Several  of  the  wealthiest  citizens,  who  had  lost 
courage,  rallied  to  the  help  of  the  city.  One 
merchant,  who  had  lost  his  store,  borrowed 
$100,000  from  McCormick  and  started  again. 
And  so  McCormick  became  not  only  one  of  the 
main  builders  of  the  first  Chicago,  but  also  of  the 
second  Chicago,  which  in  less  than  three  years  had 
become  larger  and  finer  than  the  city  that  was. 
It  was  this  steel-fibred  tenacity  that  was  the 
main  factor  in  the  success  of  McCormick, 
whether  we  consider  him  as  a  manufacturer  or 
as  a  great  American.  It  enabled  him  to  estab- 
lish the  perilous  industry  of  making  harvesting 
machines  —  a  business  so  complex  and  many- 
sided  that  out  of  every  twenty  manufacturers 
who  set  out  to  emulate  McCormick,  only  one 
survives  today.  It  enabled  McCormick  to 
hold  his  own  in  spite  of  adverse  litigation,  the 
hostility  of  Congress, the  rivalry  of  other  invent- 
ors, and  the  calamity  of  the  Great  Fire.  It 
was  so  remarkable,  and  so  productive  of  good 
to  his  country  and  to  himself,  that  he  will  always 
remain  one  of  the  creative  and  heroic  figures  in 
the  early  industrial  history  of  the  United  States. 

[153] 


CHAPTER  X 

CYRUS   H.  McCORMICK   AS  A  MAN 

CYRUS  H.  McCORMICK  was  a  great 
commercial  Thor.  He  was  six  feet  tall, 
weighed  two  hundred  pounds,  and  had  the 
massive  shoulders  of  a  wrestler.  His  body  was 
well  proportioned,  with  small  hands  and  feet. 
His  hair,  even  in  old  age,  was  very  dark  and 
waving.  His  bearing  was  erect,  his  manner 
often  imperious,  and  his  general  appearance 
that  of  a  man  built  on  large  lines  and  for 
large  affairs. 

Men  of  lesser  caliber  regarded  him  with  fear, 
not  for  any  definite  reason,  but  because,  as 
Seneca  has  said  —  "  In  him  that  has  power,  all 
men  consider  not  what  he  has  done,  but  what 
he  may  do."  He  was  so  strong,  so  dominating, 
so  ready  to  crash  through  obstacles  by  sheer  bulk 
of  will-power,  that  smaller  men  could  never  quite 
subdue  a  feeling  of  alarm  while  they  were  in 
his  presence.  He  was  impatient  of  small  talk 
and  small  criticisms  and  small  objections.  He 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

had  no  tact  at  retail,  and  he  saw  no  differences 
in  little-minded  people.  All  his  life  he  had 
been  plagued  and  obstructed  by  the  Liliputians 
of  the  world,  and  he  had  no  patience  to  listen 
to  their  chattering.  He  was  often  as  rude  as 
Carlyle  to  those  who  tied  their  little  threads  of 
pessimism  across  his  path. 

At  fashionable  gatherings  he  would  now 
and  then  be  seen  —  a  dignified  figure;  but  his 
mind  was  almost  too  ponderous  an  engine  to 
do  good  service  in  a  light  conversation.  If  a 
subject  did  not  interest  him,  he  had  nothing  to 
say.  What  gave  him,  perhaps,  the  highest 
degree  of  social  pleasure,  was  the  entertaining, 
at  his  house,  of  such  men  as  Horace  Greeley, 
William  H.  Seward,  Peter  Cooper,  Abram  S. 
Hewitt,  George  Peabody,  Junius  Morgan, 
Cyrus  W.  Field,  or  some  old  friend  from 
Virginia. 

His  long  years  of  pioneering  had  made  him 
a  self-sufficient  man,  and  a  man  who  lived 
from  within.  He  did  not  pick  up  his  opinions 
on  the  streets.  His  mind  was  not  open  to  any 
chance  idea.  He  had  certain  clear,  definite 

[155] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMI.CK 

convictions,  logical  and  consistent.  What  he 
knew,  he  knew.  There  were  no  hazy  imagin- 
ings in  his  mind.  The  main  secret  of  his 
power  lay  in  his  ability  to  focus  all  his  energies 
upon  a  few  subjects.  Once,  in  1848,  he  men- 
tioned the  French  Revolution  in  one  of  his 
letters.  "It  is  a  mighty  affair,"  he  wrote, 
"and  will  be  likely  to  stand."  But  usually  he 
paid  little  attention  to  the  world-dramas  that 
were  being  enacted.  He  was  too  busy  —  too 
devoted  to  affairs  which,  if  he  did  not  attend 
to  them,  would  not  be  attended  to  at  all. 

McCormick  was  a  product  of  the  Protestant 
Reformation,  and  of  the  capitalistic  develop- 
ment that  came  with  it.  The  whole  structure 
of  his  character  was  based  upon  the  two  great 
dogmas  of  the  Reformation  —  the  sovereignty 
of  God  and  the  direct  responsibility  of  the  in- 
dividual. Whoever  would  know  the  springs 
at  which  his  life  was  fed  must  read  the  story  of 
Luther,  Calvin,  and  Knox.  They  must  call 
to  mind  the  attitude  of  Luther  at  the  Diet  of 
Worms,  when  he  faced  the  men  who  had  the 
power  to  take  his  life  and  said,  "Here  I  stand. 

[156] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

I  can  do  no  other."  They  must  recollect  how 
these  three  men,  who  were  leaders  of  nations, 
not  sects,  stood  out  alone  against  the  kings  and 
ecclesiasticisms  of  Europe,  without  wealth, 
without  armies,  without  anything  except  a 
higher  Moral  Idea,  and  succeeded  so  might- 
ily they  actually  changed  the  course  of  em- 
pires and  became  the  pathfinders  of  the 
human  race. 

McCormick  was  so  essentially  a  result  of  this 
religio-economic  movement  that  it  is  impossible 
to  separate  his  religion  and  his  business  life. 
He  was  an  individualist  through  and  through 
—  as  well  marked  a  type  of  the  Covenanter  in 
commerce  as  the  United  States  has  ever  pro- 
duced. He  believed  in  presbyters  in  religion, 
private  capitalists  in  business,  and  elected 
representatives  in  government.  He  was  op- 
posed to  feudalism  and  bureaucracy  in  all  their 
myriad  forms.  He  held  the  middle  ground, 
the  via  media,  between  the  over-organization 
of  the  fourteenth  century,  when  the  rights  of 
the  individual  were  forgotten,  and  the  lax  liber- 
alism of  to-day,  when  too  much  is  left  to  indi- 

[157] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

vidual  whim  and  caprice,  and  when  duties  and 
responsibilities  are  too  apt  to  be  ignored. 

Above  all  constituted  authorities  stood  a 
man's  own  conscience.  This  was  McCormick's 
faith,  and  it  was  this  that  made  him  the  fighter 
that  he  was.  It  gave  him  courage  and  the 
fortitude  that  is  rarer  than  courage.  It  com- 
pelled him  to  oppose  his  own  political  party 
at  the  Baltimore  Convention  of  1861.  It  made 
him  stand  single-handed  against  his  fellow- 
manufacturers,  in  defence  of  his  rights  as 
an  inventor.  It  enabled  him  to  beat  down 
the  Pennsylvania  Railroad,  after  a  twenty- 
three  year  contest,  and  to  prove  that  a  great 
corporation  cannot  lawfully  do  an  injustice 
to  an  individual. 

McCormick  was  nourished  on  this  virile  Cal- 
vinistic  faith  from  the  time  when  he  first  learned 
to  read  out  of  the  Shorter  Catechism  and  the 
Bible.  It  had  been  the  faith  of  his  fathers  for 
generations,  and  it  was  bred  into  him  from  boy- 
hood. Nevertheless,  according  to  the  practice 
of  the  Presbyterians,  there  had  to  come  a  time 
when  he  himself  openly  made  his  choice.  This 

[158] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

occasion  came  in  1834,  when  McCormick  was 
twenty-five  years  of  age.  A  four-day  meeting 
was  being  held  in  the  little  stone  church  on  his 
grandfather's  farm.  Three  ministers  were  in 
charge.  As  was  the  custom,  there  was  constant 
preaching  from  morning  until  sundown,  with 
an  hour's-  respite  for  dinner.  At  the  close  of 
the  fourth  day,  all  who  wished  to  become  avowed 
Christians  were  requested  to  stand  up.  Cyrus 
McCormick  was  there,  and  he  was  not  a  member 
of  the  church;  yet  he  did  not  stand  up.  That 
night  his  father  went  to  his  bedside  and  gently 
reproached  him.  "My  son,"  he  said,  "don't 
you  know  that  your  silence  is  a  public  rejection 
of  your  Saviour?"  Cyrus  was  conscience- 
stricken.  He  leapt  from  his  bed  and  began  to 
dress  himself.  "I'll  go  and  see  old  Billy  Mc- 
Clung,"  he  said.  Half  an  hour  later,  old  Billy 
McClung,  who  was  a  universally  respected  re- 
ligious leader  in  the  community,  was  amazed  to 
be  called  out  of  his  sleep  by  a  greatly  troubled 
young  man,  who  wanted  to  know  by  what  means 
he  might  make  his  peace  with  his  Maker.  The 
next  Sunday  this  young  man  stood  up  in  the 

[159] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

church,  and  became  in  name  what  he  already 
was  by  nature  and  inheritance  —  a  Christian 
of  the  Presbyterian  faith. 

After  he  left  home  his  letters  to  the  members 
of  his  family  are  strewn  with  scraps  of  religious 
reflection.  In  1845,  for  instance,  he  writes, 
"Business  is  not  inconsistent  with  Christianity; 
but  the  latter  ought  to  be  a  help  to  the  former, 
giving  a  confidence  and  resignation,  after  using 
all  proper  means;  and  yet  I  have  sometimes  felt 
that  I  came  so  far  short  of  the  right  feeling,  so 
worldly-minded,  that  I  could  wish  myself  out 
of  the  world."  On  another  occasion,  when  he 
was  struggling  with  manufacturers  who  had 
broken  their  contracts,  he  wrote,  "If  it  were  not 
for  the  fact  that  Providence  has  seemed  to  assist 
me  in  our  business,  it  has  at  times  seemed  that  I 
would  almost  sink  under  the  weight  of  respon- 
sibility hanging  upon  me;  but  I  believe  the  Lord 
will  help  us  out."  And  after  his  first  visit  to 
New  York  City,  he  summed  up  his  impressions 
of  the  metropolis  in  the  following  sentence,  "It 
is  a  desirable  place  and  people,  with  regular  and 
good  Presbyterian  preaching." 

[160] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

McCormick  enjoyed  with  all  his  heart  the 
logical,  doctrinal  sermon.  His  favorite  Bible 
passage  was  the  eighth  chapter  of  Romans,  that 
indomitable  victorious  chapter  that  ends  like 
the  blast  of  a  trumpet: 

"Who  shall  separate  us  from  the  love  of 
Christ?  Shall  tribulation,  or  distress,  or  per- 
secution, or  famine,  or  nakedness,  or  peril,  or 
sword?  As  it  is  written,  'for  Thy  sake  we  are 
killed  all  the  day  long;  we  are  accounted  as 
sheep  for  the  slaughter/  Nay,  in  all  these 
things  we  are  more  than  conquerors  through 
Him  that  loved  us;  for  I  am  persuaded  that 
neither  death,  nor  life,  nor  angels,  nor  principal- 
ities, nor  powers,  nor  things  present,  nor  things 
to  come,  nor  height,  nor  depth,  nor  any  other 
creature,  shall  be  able  to  separate  us  from  the 
love  of  God,  which  is  in  Christ  Jesus,  our  Lord." 

His  favorite  hymn,  which  he  sang  often  and 
with  the  deepest  fervor,  was  that  melodious 
prayer  that  begins  — 

"  O  Thou  in  whose  presence  my  soul  takes  delight, 
On  whom  in  affliction  I  call, 
My  comfort  by  day,  and  my  song  in  the  night, 
My  hope,  my  salvation,  my  all." 

[161] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

In  his  earlier  journeys  through  the  Middle 
West,  McCormick  was  distressed  at  the  rough 
immorality  of  the  new  settlements.  "I  see  a 
great  deal  of  profanity  and  infidelity  in  this 
country,  enough  to  make  the  heart  sick,'*  he 
wrote  in  1845.  These  towns  and  villages  needed 
more  preachers,  and  better  preachers,  he  thought. 
Consequently,  soon  after  he  had  acquired  his 
first  million  dollars,  he  determined  to  establish 
the  best  possible  college  for  the  education  of 
ministers.  He  almost  stunned  with  joy  the 
Western  friends  of  higher  education  for  ministers, 
by  offering  them  $100,000  with  which  to  estab- 
lish a  school  of  theology  in  Chicago.  This  offer 
was  made  in  1859  —  half  a  century  ago,  and 
resulted  in  the  removal  of  a  moneyless  and  de- 
caying Seminary  at  New  Albany,  Indiana,  to 
Chicago.  Thus  was  founded  the  Northwestern 
Theological  Seminary,  afterwards  named  the 
McCormick  Theological  Seminary,  which,  in 
its  fifty  years  of  life,  has  given  a  Christian  edu- 
cation to  thousands  of  young  men. 

Thirteen  years  later  he  bought  The  Interior 
and  made  it  what  it  has  remained  ever  since  — 

[162] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

a  religious  weekly  of  the  highest  rank.  These 
two  —  the  college  and  the  paper  —  were  his 
pride  and  delight.  He  fathered  them  in  the 

% 

most  affectionate  way.  No  matter  what  crisis 
might  be  impending  in  the  war  of  business,  he 
always  had  time  to  talk  to  his  editors  and  his 
professors.  So,  though  McCormick  had  received 
much  from  his  religious  inheritance,  it  is  also 
true  that  he  gave  back  much.  His  last  public 
speech,  which  was  read  for  him  by  his  son  Cyrus 
because  he  was  too  weak  to  deliver  it  himself, 
wras  given  at  the  laying  of  the  corner-stone  of  a 
new  building  which  he  had  given  to  the  college. 
Its  last  sentence  was  typical  of  McCormick  — 
full  of  hope  and  optimism:  "I  never  doubted 
that  success  would  ultimately  reward  our  ef- 
forts," he  said;  "and  now,  on  this  occasion,  we 
may  fairly  say  that  the  night  has  given  place  to 
the  dawn  of  a  brighter  day  than  any  which  has 
hitherto  shone  upon  us." 

McCormick  went  into  politics,  too,  with  the 
same  conscientious  abandon  with  which  he 
plunged  into  business  and  religion.  He  was  a 
Democrat  of  the  Jeffersonian  type.  One  of  his 

[163] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

keenest  pleasures  was  to  go  to  the  Senate  and 
listen  to  its  debates.  He  was  not  a  fluent  speaker 
himself,  but  he  delighted  in  the  orations  of  Clay, 
Calhoun,  and  Webster.  He  believed  in  politics. 
He  thought  it  a  public  danger  that  the  strong 
and  competent  men  of  the  republic  should  will- 
ingly permit  men  of  little  ability  and  low  char- 
acter to  manage  public  affairs.  In  fact,  he  was 
almost  as  much  a  pathfinder  and  pioneer  in  this 
matter  as  he  had  been  in  matters  of  business, 
but  without  the  same  measure  of  success.  Pol- 
itics, he  found,  was  not  like  business.  Its 
successes  depended  not  upon  your  own  efforts, 
but  upon  the  votes  of  the  majority. 

What  McCormick  tried  to  do  as  a  citizen  and 
a  patriot  was  the  one  heroic  failure  of  his  life. 
He  ran  for  office  on  several  occasions,  but  he 
was  never  elected.  He  was  not  the  sort  of  man 
who  gets  elected.  He  stood  for  his  whole  party 
at  a  time  when  the  average  politician  was  stand- 
ing only  for  himself.  He  talked  of  "fundamen- 
tal principles"  while  the  other  leaders,  for  the 
most  part,  were  thinking  of  salaries.  He  gave 
up  his  time  and  his  money  as  freely  for  politics 

[164] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

as  he  did  for  religion;  but  he  was  out  of  his 
element.  He  was  too  sincere,  too  simple,  too 
intent  upon  a  larger  view  of  public  questions. 
He  could  never  talk  the  flexible  language  of 
diplomacy  nor  suit  his  theme  to  the  prejudice 
of  his  listeners.  Usually,  to  the  political  man- 
agers and  delegates  with  whom  he  felt  it  his 
duty  to  co-operate,  he  was  like  a  man  from 
another  world.  They  could  never  understand 
him,  and  tolerated  his  leadership  mainly  be- 
cause of  his  generous  contributions.  Again  and 
again  he  astonished  them  by  developing  a  party 
speech  into  a  sermon  on  national  righteousness, 
or  by  speaking  nobly  of  a  political  opponent. 
On  one  memorable  occasion,  for  instance,  in 
the  white-hot  passion  of  the  Hayes-Tilden  con- 
troversy, and  after  he  had  lavished  time  and 
money  in  support  of  Tilden,  he  sprang  to  his 
feet  in  a  Democratic  convention  and  amazed 
the  delegates  by  saying:  "Mr.  Hayes  is  not  a 
Democrat,  but  he  is  too  patriotic  and  honest 
to  suit  his  party  managers  and  we  must  sustain 
him  so  far  as  he  is  right." 

He  was  one  of  the  first  Americans  who  rose 

[165] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

above  sectional  interests  and  party  loyalties, 
and  surveyed  his  country  as  a  whole.  No  other 
man  of  his  day,  either  in  or  out  of  public  office, 
was  so  free  from  local  prejudices  and  so  intensely 
national  in  his  beliefs  and  sympathies.  He  re- 
fused to  stamp  himself  with  the  label  of  the 
North  or  of  the  South.  He  had  been  reared 
in  the  one  and  matured  in  the  other.  And  in 
the  ominous  days  before  the  Civil  War  he 
strove  like  a  beneficent  giant  to  make  the 
wrangling  partisans  listen  to  the  voice  of 
reason  and  arbitration. 

He  went  to  the  Democratic  Convention  at 
Baltimore,  just  before  the  war>  and  set  before 
the  Southerners  the  standpoint  of  the  North. 
Then  he  bought  a  daily  paper  —  The  Times 
—  to  explain  to  Chicago  the  standpoint  of  the 
South.  He  wrote  editorials.  He  made  speeches. 
He  poured  into  the  newspapers,  day  after  day 
for  two  years,  a  large  share  of  the  profits  that 
he  derived  from  his  Reaper.  He  was  no  more 
popular  as  an  editor  than  as  a  political  candi- 
date. He  was  a  maker,  not  a  collector,  of  public 
opinion;  and  instead  of  pandering  to  the  war 

[166] 


HIS          LIFE          AND         WORK 

frenzy,  he  opposed  it,  —  put  his  newspaper 
squarely  in  its  path,  and  held  it  there  until  the 
feet  of  the  crowd  had  trampled  it  into  an  im- 
possible wreck. 

He  was  so  strong,  so  indomitable,  this  heir  of 
the  Covenanters,  that  when  the  war  had  openly 
begun,  he  strode  between  the  North  and  South 
and  labored  like  a  Titan  to  bring  them  to  a 
reconciliation.  He  actually  believed  that  he 
could  establish  peace.  He  proposed  a  plan. 
Horace  Greeley  indorsed  it,  and  the  two  men, 
who  were  throughout  life  the  closest  of  comrades, 
undertook  to  bring  the  severed  nation  back  to 
union  and  the  paths  of  law. 

The  "McCormick  Plan,"  in  a  word  was  to 
call  immediately  two  conventions  —  one  to  rep- 
resent the  Democrats  of  the  North  and  the 
other  the  Democrats  of  the  South.  These  con- 
ventions would  elect  delegates  to  a  board  of 
arbitration,  which  would  consider  the  various 
causes  of  the  war  and  arrange  a  just  basis  upon 
which  both  sides  could  agree  to  disband  their 
armies  and  reestablish  peace. 

After  the  war,  too,  almost  before  the  nation 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

had  finished  counting  its  dead,  it  was  Cyrus 
H.  McCormick  whose  voice  was  first  heard  in 
favor  of  church  unity.  Among  the  many 
speeches  and  letters  of  his  which  have  been 
preserved,  the  most  beautifully  phrased  para- 
graph is  the  ending  of  an  article  that  he  pub- 
lished in  1869,  protesting  against  the  invasion 
of  political  partisanism  into  the  religious  life. 

"  When  are  we  to  look  for  the  return  of  broth- 
erly love  and  Christian  fellowship,"  he  asked, 
"so  long  as  those  who  aspire  to  fill  the  high 
places  of  the  church  indulge  in  such  wrath  and 
bitterness  ?  Now  that  the  great  conflict  of  the 
Civil  War  is  past,  and  its  issues  settled,  religion 
and  patriotism  alike  require  the  exercise  of 
mutual  forbearance,  and  the  pursuit  of  those 
things  which  tend  to  peace." 

For  the  mere  game  of  party  politics  Mr. 
McCormick  cared  little  or  nothing.  It  was  all 
as  irksome  to  him  as  the  task  of  governing 
Geneva  was  to  John  Calvin;  but  he  could  not 
help  himself.  His  political  convictions  were 
bone  of  his  bone  and  flesh  of  his  flesh.  They 
were  racial  traits  which  his  forefathers  and  fore- 

[168] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

mothers  had  spent  at  least  three  centuries  in 
developing. 

On  one  occasion  Dr.  John  Hall  of  New  York, 
seeing  how  Mr.  McCormick  was  worried  by 
political  obligations,  said  to  him: 

"Why  do  you  plague  yourself  with  these 
uncongenial  things  ?  What  glory  can  you  hope 
to  get  from  politics  that  will  add  to  what  you 
now  possess  as  the  inventor  of  the  Reaper?" 

"Dr.  Hall,"  replied  Mr.  McCormick,  "I  am 
in  politics  because  I  cannot  help  it.  There  are 
certain  principles  that  I  have  got  to  stand 
by,  and  I  am  obliged  to  go  into  politics  to 
defend  them." 

The  form  of  Mr.  McCormick's  religious  faith 
had  been  forged  by  such  preacher-patriots  as 
John  Knox  and  Andrew  Melville;  and  he,  like 
them,  found  it  as  imperative  upon  his  conscience 
to  fight  for  both  civil  and  religious  liberty. 
With  his  whole  heart  he  believed  in  American 
institutions  as  they  had  been  established  by  the 
nation-builders  of  1776.  He  did  not  want  the 
Constitution  to  be  ignored  by  Federal  reformers, 
nor  the  Union  to  be  broken  by  secession.  He 

[169] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

was  by  temperament  and  tradition  a  conser- 
vative, and  opposed  especially  to  all  extreme 
measures  and  sectional  innovations.  As  he 
had  adapted  his  Reaper  so  that  it  would  cut 
grain  in  all  States,  he  could  never  see  why  polit- 
ical policies,  too,  should  not  be  lifted  above  the 
limitations  of  geography  and  made  to  conserve 
the  welfare  of  the  whole  people.  As  he  said  on 
one  strenuous  occasion  when  laboring  might- 
ily to  beat  back  the  extremists  in  his  own 
party:  "Is  not  every  government  on  the  face 
of  the  earth  established  upon  the  principle 
of  compromise?" 

To  special  privileges  of  every  sort  he  was  un- 
alterably opposed.  He  asked  for  none  for  him- 
self —  no  favoring  tariff  or  grant  of  public  land 
or  monopolistic  franchise.  "I  have  been 
throughout  my  life,"  he  said,  "opposed  to  all 
measures  which  tend  to  raise  one  class  of  the 
American  people  upon  the  ruin  of  others,  or 
one  section  of  our  common  country  at  the 
expense  of  another.  The  country  is  the  common 
property  of  all  parties,  and  all  are  interested  in 
its  prosperity." 

[170] 


HIS         LIFE        AND         WORK 

All  this  shows  the  heroic  side  of  McCormick; 
but  he  was  not  always  heroic.  He  was  a  giant, 
but  a  most  human  and  simple-natured  giant. 
Strange  as  it  may  sound  to  those  who  knew  him 
only  with  his  armor  on,  it  is  true  that  he  could 
be  tender  or  humorous.  There  were  tears  and 
laughter  in  him,  There  was  no  cruelty  in  his 
strength  and  no  revenge  in  his  aggressiveness. 
He  was  a  big,  red-blooded,  great-hearted  man, 
who  might  to-day  be  threatening  to  cane  a  poli- 
tician who  had  deceived  him,  and  to-morrow  be 
playing  with  his  younger  children  and  letting 
their  two  pet  squirrels,  Zip  and  Zoe,  chase  each 
other  around  his  shoulders. 

He  was  fond  of  power,  not  because  of  its 
privileges  and  exemptions,  but  because  it  fur- 
thered the  work  that  he  had  in  hand.  He  was 
often  surrounded  by  sycophants  —  by  men  who 
said  yes  to  his  yes  and  no  to  his  no;  and  while 
he  accepted  this  homage  with  a  certain  degree 
of  satisfaction,  he  was  not  deceived  by  it.  On 
one  occasion,  when  he  was  attending  the  Demo- 
cratic Convention  at  Cincinnati  —  the  con- 
vention that  nominated  Hancock  as  candidate 

[171] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

for  President, —  he  was  beset  by  a  court  of 
flatterers  and  lip-servers.  After  it  was  over, 
he  remarked  simply  to  his  valet,  "Well,  Charlie, 
there  is  a  lot  of  farce  and  humbug  about  this." 
Dr.  Francis  L.  Patton,  who  was  for  years  the 
president  of  Princeton  University  and  also  at 
one  time  editor  of  The  Interior,  was  especially 
impressed  with  this  direct  naturalness  of  Mc- 
Cormick.  "One  meets  with  all  sorts  of  men 
in  the  course  of  a  lifetime,"  said  Dr.  Patton. 
"There  are  patronizing  men,  pompous  men, 
men  who  habitually  wear  a  mask  of  seriousness, 
men  who  clothe  themselves  with  dignity  as  with 
a  coat  of  mail  lest  you  should  presume  too  much 
or  go  too  far,  men  whose  position  is  never 
defined,  and  double-minded  men  with  whom 
you  never  feel  yourself  safe.  But  Mr.  Mc- 
Cormick  was  not  like  one  of  these.  There  is 
that  in  the  possession  of  power  which  always 
tends  to  make  men  imperious.  I  do  not  mean 
to  imply  that  he  was  altogether  free  from  this 
tendency,  for  he  was  not.  But  he  was  approach- 
able, companionable,  and  ready  to  hear  what 
I  had  to  say.  He  was  not  one  of  those  men  who 

[172] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

are  so  uninterestingly  self-controlled  as  to  be 
always  the  same.  There  were  times  when  his 
mirth  was  contagious  and  times  when  his 
wrath  was  kindled  a  little.  We  did  not 
always  agree,  and  sometimes  we  both  grew 
hot  in  argument;  but  at  the  end  his  cheery 
laugh  proclaimed  the  fact  that  our  differences 
had  only  been  the  free  and  easy  give-and-take 
of  friendship." 

To  see  McCormick  laugh  was  a  spectacle. 
There  was  first  a  mellowing  of  his  usual  Jovian 
manner.  His  gray-brown  eyes  twinkled.  The 
tense  lines  of  his  face  relaxed.  Then  came  a 
smile  and  soon  a  burst  of  laughter,  shaking  his 
powerful  body  and  putting  the  whole  company 
for  the  time  into  an  uproar  of  merriment.  It 
was  the  triumph  of  the  genial  and  magnetic  side 
of  his  nature  —  the  side  that  was  ordinarily 
repressed  by  the  pressure  of  his  big  affairs. 

McCormick  had  humor,  but  not  wit.  His 
jokes  were  simple  and  old-fashioned,  such  as 
Luther  and  Cromwell  would  have  laughed  at. 
There  was  no  innuendo  and  no  cynicism. 
On  one  occasion  two  small  urchins  knocked  at 

[173] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

the  door  and  asked  for  food.  McCormick  heard 
their  voices  and  had  them  brought  into  the  sit- 
ting-room, where  he  happened  to  be  in  con- 
sultation with  his  lawyer.  "Now,"  said  he  to 
the  youngsters,  "  we  are  going  to  put  both  of  you 
on  trial.  I  will  be  the  judge  and  this  gentle- 
man will  be  the  prosecutor."  Each  boy  in 
turn  was  placed  on  the  witness-stand,  and  plied 
with  questions.  It  was  soon  clear  that  neither 
of  them  was  telling  the  truth,  so  "Judge"  Mc- 
Cormick took  them  in  hand  and  gave  them  a 
serious  talk  on  the  folly  and  wickedness  of  lying. 
Then  he  gave  them  twenty-five  cents  apiece, 
and  sent  them  down  to  the  kitchen  to  eat  as 
much  supper  as  they  could  hold. 

At  another  time  a  very  dignified  and  self- 
centred  military  officer  was  taking  supper  with 
the  McCormick  family.  The  first  course,  as 
usual,  was  corn-meal  mush  and  milk.  This 
was  served  in  Scotch  fashion,  with  the  hot  mush 
in  one  bowl  and  the  cold  milk  in  another,  and 
the  practice  was  to  so  co-ordinate  the  eating  of 
these  that  both  were  finished  at  the  same  time. 
The  officer  planned  his  spoonfuls  badly,  and 

[174] 


3^ 


CAU1 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

was  soon  out  of  milk.  "Have  some  more  milk 
to  finish  your  mush,  Colonel,"  said  McCormick. 
Several  minutes  later  the  ColoneFs  mush  bowl 
was  empty,  at  which  McCormick  said,  "Have 
some  more  mush  to  finish  your  milk."  And 
so  it  went,  with  milk  for  the  mush  and  mush 
for  the  milk,  until  the  unfortunate  Colonel  was 
hopelessly  incapacitated  for  the  four  or  five 
courses  that  came  afterwards. 

McCormick  was  not  by  any  means  a  teller 
of  stories,  but  he  had  a  few  simple  and  well- 
worn  anecdotes  that  appealed  so  strongly  to  his 
sense  of  humor  that  he  told  and  re-told  them 
many  times.  There  was  the  story  of  the  man 
who  stole  the  pound  of  butter  and  hid  it  in  his 
hat,  and  how  the  grocer  saw  him  and  kept  talk- 
ing in  the  store,  beside  a  hot  stove,  until  the 
butter  melted  and  exposed  the  man's  thievery. 
Another  favorite  story  was  about  the  pig  that 
found  its  way  into  a  garden  by  walking  through 
a  hollowr  log,  and  how  the  gardener  fooled 
the  pig  by  placing  the  hollow  log  in  such  a  way 
that  both  ends  of  it  were  on  the  outside 
of  the  garden. 

[175] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

Even  McCormick's  jokes  had  a  certain  moral 
tang  —  a  flavor  of  the  first  Psalrn  and  the  eighth 
chapter  of  Romans.  They  were  apt  to  deal 
with  the  troubles  of  the  ungodly  who  had  been 
caught  in  their  wickedness.  There  were  times, 
too,  when  his  sense  of  humor  and  his  sense  of 
justice  would  co-operate  in  odd  ways.  Once, 
when  a  roast  game  bird,  which  had  been  sent 
to  him  as  a  gift  from  the  hunter,  was  left  over 
from  supper,  he  ordered  that  his  dainty  be  kept 
and  served  for  the  next  day's  luncheon.  At 
luncheon  the  next  day  it  did  not  appear.  On 
asking  for  the  game  bird,  a  roast  chicken  was 
set  before  him,  and  he  at  once  noticed  that  it 
was  not  the  same  bird  which  he  had  ordered  to 
be  kept.  He  questioned  the  butler,  who  pro- 
tested that  it  was  the  same.  After  the  meal 
McCormick  ordered  that  the  servants  involved 
should  be  called  into  the  dining-room.  From 
them,  by  a  series  of  questions,  he  soon  obtained 
the  truth  and  proved  the  butler  to  be  the  culprit. 
The  one  thing  that  he  would  tolerate  least  was 
a  lie.  As  he  would  say  at  times,  "A  thief  you 
can  watch,  but  I  detest  a  liar." 

[170] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

There  were  very  few  who  had  the  temerity  to 
play  a  practical  joke  upon  the  great  inventor 
himself.  His  two  youngest  sons,  Harold  and 
Stanley,  would  hide  in  the  hallway  when  they 
saw  him  approaching,  and  pounce  out  upon 
him  with  wild  yells  in  small-boy  fashion,  but 
they  were  both  privileged  people. 

McCormick  was  a  most  hearty  and  hospitable 
man.  He  was  an  ideal  person  for  such  a  life- 
work  —  the  abolition  of  famine.  He  was  fond 
of  food  and  plenty  of  it.  He  loved  to  see  a  big 
table  heaped  with  food.  The  idea  of  hunger  was 
intolerable  to  him.  He  might  well  have  been 
posing  for  a  statue  of  the  deity  of  Plenty,  as  he 
squared  himself  around  to  the  long,  family 
dinner-table,  with  his  napkin  worn  high  and 
caught  at  his  shoulders  by  a  white  silk  band  that 
went  around  his  neck,  and  with  a  complacent, 
"Now,  then,"  plunged  the  carving-fork  into  a 
crisp  and  fragrant  fowl  that  lay  on  the  platter 
in  front  of  him. 

The  fact  that  McCormick  seldom  made  a 
social  call  was  not  due  to  his  own  choosing,  but 
because  of  the  many  worries  and  compulsions 

[177] 


CYRUS       HALL      McCORMICK 

of  his  life.  Once,  when  confiding  in  an  intimate 
friend,  he  said,  "  It  pains  me  very  much  to  think 
how  little  I  am  known  by  my  neighbors,  but  I 
seem  to  be  always  too  busy  to  meet  them."  He 
was  not  at  all,  as  many  have  thought  because 
of  his  strenuous  life,  a  man  of  harsh  and  rough 
exterior.  There  was  nothing  rough  about  him 
except  his  strength.  He  was  irreproachable  in 
dress  and  personal  appearance.  He  did  not 
drink,  smoke,  nor  swear.  And  his  manners 
and  language,  on  formal  occasions,  were  those 
of  a  dignified  gentleman  of  the  old  school  — 
a  Calhoun,  or  a  Van  Buren. 

He  was  not  a  hard-natured  man,  except  when 
he  was  battling  for  his  rights  and  his  principles. 
He  would  often  turn  from  an  overwhelming  mass 
of  business  to  play  with  one  of  his  children.  He 
was  as  ready  to  forgive  as  he  was  to  fight.  He 
never  cherished  resentments  or  personal  grudges. 
He  knew  that  life  was  a  conflict  of  interests  and 
policies;  and  when  he  forgave,  his  forgiveness 
was  free  and  full,  and  not  a  formal  ceremony. 
It  was  as  honest  and  as  spontaneous  as  his  wrath. 
He  was  one  of  the  few  men  who  could  freely 

[178] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

pray,  "Forgive  us  our  trespasses  as  we  forgive 
those  who  trespass  against  us." 

His  fame  and  honors  and  intimacies  with 
people  of  rank  never  made  him  less  democratic 
in  his  sympathies.  He  always  had  a  profound 
respect  for  the  man  or  woman  who  did  useful 
work,  if  the  work  was  done  well.  Once,  when 
a  poor  woman  went  to  him  for  advice  about  some 
trifling  thing  that  she  had  invented,  he  turned 
from  his  work  and  explained  to  her,  with  the 
utmost  patience  and  courtesy,  the  things  that 
she  wished  to  know.  With  his  trusted  employees, 
too,  he  was  usually  kindly  and  sometimes  jovial. 
"I  had  only  one  brush  with  him  in  thirty-five 
years,"  said  one  of  his  cashiers.  "The  last 
time  that  I  saw  him,  he  met  me  on  the  street 
and  said,  'Hello,  Sellick,  have  you  got  lots  of 
money  ?  Can  you  give  me  a  hundred  thousand 
dollars  to-day ?'•  'Yes,  sir,' I  answered.  'Well, 
I'm  glad  I  don't  need  it,'  he  said  with  a  laugh." 

The  loyalty  of  his  workmen  and  his  agents 
was  always  a  source  of  pride  to  McCormick. 
It  was  one  of  the  favorite  topics  of  his  conversa- 
tion. He  would  mention  his  men  by  name  and 

[179] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

tell  of  their  exploits  with  the  deepest  satisfaction. 
On  one  occasion,  when  a  body  of  agents  made  a 
united  demand  for  higher  salaries,  there  was  one 
agent  in  Minnesota  who  refused  to  take  part 
in  the  movement.  "I  don't  want  to  force  Mr. 
McCormick,"  he  said.  "I  have  worked  for 
him  for  nearly  thirty  years,  and  I  know  that  he 
is  a  just  man,  and  that  he  will  do  what  is  right." 
Not  long  afterwards,  McCormick  was  told  of 
this  man's  action,  and  he  immediately  showed 
his  appreciation  by  making  the  agent  a  present 
of  a  carriage  and  fine  team  of  horses. 

There  was  one  man  who  was  wholly  in  Mc- 
Cormick's  power  —  a  negro  named  Joe,  who, 
by  the  custom  that  prevailed  in  the  South  before 
the  Civil  War,  was  a  slave  and  the  property  of 
McCormick.  They  were  of  the  same  age,  and 
had  played  together  as  boys.  Joe  grew  up  to 
be  a  tall,  straight,  intelligent  negro,  and  his 
master  was  very  fond  of  him.  He  is  mentioned 
frequently  in  McCormick's  letters,  usually  in  a 
considerate  way.  Years  before  the  Civil  War 
McCormick  gave  Joe  his  freedom,  and  some 
land  and  a  good  cabin.  Now  and  then,  even  in 

[180] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

the  stress  and  strain  of  his  business-building, 
he  would  stop  to  write  Joe  a  short  letter  of  good 
wishes  and  advice.  There  was  no  other  one 
thing,  perhaps,  which  proved  so  convincingly 
the  essential  kindliness  of  his  nature  as  his  treat- 
ment of  Joe. 

In  his  family  relations,  too,  McCormick  was 
a  man  of  tenderness  and  devotion.  When  his 
father  died,  in  1846,  he  was  struck  down  by 
sorrow.  "  Many  a  sore  cry  have  I  had  as  I  have 
gone  around  this  place  and  found  no  father," 
he  wrote  to  his  brother  William.  And  as  soon 
as  he  was  solidly  established  in  Chicago,  his 
first  act  was  to  send  for  his  mother,  and  to  give 
her  such  a  royal  welcome  that  she  could  hardly 
believe  her  eyes.  "I  feel  like  the  Queen  of 
Sheba,"  she  said  to  her  neighbors  when  she 
returned  to  Virginia;  "the  half  was  never  told." 

McCormick  helped  his  younger  brothers  — 
William  and  Leander,  by  making  them  his 
partners.  William  died  in  1865  —  a  great  and 
irreparable  loss.  He  was  a  man  of  careful  mind 
and  rare  excellence  of  character,  especially  able 
in  matters  of  detail  —  a  point  in  which  Cyrus 

[181] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

McCormick  was  not  proficient.  The  two  men 
were  well  suited  as  partners.  Cyrus  planned 
the  work  in  large  outlines,  and  broke  down  the 
obstacles  that  stood  in  the  way;  while  William 
added  the  details  and  supervised  the  carrying 
out  of  the  plan.  Leander,  who  also  held  a 
high  place  in  the  business  in  its  earlier  days, 
withdrew  from  it  later,  and  died  in  1900. 

Until  1858  McCormick  had  thought  himself 
too  busy  to  be  married.  But  in  that  year  he 
met  Miss  Nettie  Fowler,  of  New  York,  and 
changed  his  mind.  It  was  soon  apparent  that 
his  marriage  was  not  to  be  in  any  sense  a  hin- 
drance to  his  success,  but  rather  the  wisest  act  of 
his  life.  Mrs.  McCormick  was  a  woman  of 
rare  charm,  and  with  a  comprehension  of  busi- 
ness affairs  that  was  of  the  greatest  possible  value 
to  her  husband.  She  was  at  all  times  in  the 
closest  touch  with  his  purposes.  By  her  advice 
he  introduced  many  economies  at  the  factory, 
and  rebuilt  the  works  after  the  Great  Fire  of 
1871.  The  precision  of  her  memory,  and  the 
grasp  of  her  mind  upon  the  multifarious  details 
of  human  nature  and  manufacturing,  made  her 

r  182 1 


CYRUS   HALL  McCORMICK,  188.1 
His  Last  Portrait 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

an  ideal  wife  for  such  a  man  as  Cyrus  H.  McCor- 
mick.  As  he  grew  older,  he  depended  upon  her 
judgment  more  and  more;  and  as  Mrs.  McCor- 
mick  is  still  in  the  possession  of  health  and 
strength,  it  may  truly  be  said  that  for  more  than 
half  a  century  she  has  been  a  most  influential 
factor  in  the  industrial  and  philanthropic  devel- 
opment of  the  United  States. 

Four  sons  were  born,  and  two  daughters  — 
Cyrus  Hall,  who  is  now  President  of  the  Inter- 
national Harvester  Company;  Robert,  who  died 
in  infancy;  Harold,  Treasurer  of  the  Inter- 
national Harvester  Company;  Stanley,  Comp- 
troller of  the  Company;  Virginia;  and  Anita, 
now  known  as  Mrs.  Emmons  Elaine. 

Mr.  McCormick  was  a  most  affectionate  hus- 
band and  father.  He  took  the  utmost  delight 
in  his  home  and  its  hospitalities ;  and  invariably 
brought  his  whole  household  with  him  whenever 
the  growth  of  his  business  obliged  him  to  visit 
foreign  countries.  In  the  last  few  years  of  his 
life  it  gave  him  the  most  profound  satisfaction 
to  know  that  his  oldest  son  would  pick  up 
the  McCormick  burden  and  carry  it  forward. 

[183] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

"  Cyrus  is  a  great  comfort  to  me,"  he  said  to  an 
intimate  friend.  "He  has  excellent  judgment 
in  business  matters,  and  I  find  myself  leaning 
on  him  more  and  more." 

The  truth  is  that  there  was  a  tender  side  to 
McConnick's  strong  nature,  which  was  not  seen 
by  those  who  met  him  only  upon  ordinary 
occasions.  He  was  in  reality  a  great  dynamo 
of  sentiment.  He  was  deeply  moved  by  music, 
especially  by  the  playing  of  Ole  Bull  and  the 
singing  of  Jenny  Lind,  who  were  his  favorites. 
He  was  as  fond  of  flowers  as  a  child.  "I  love 
best  the  old-fashioned  pinks,"  he  said,  "be- 
cause they  grew  in  my  mother's  garden  in 
Virginia."  Often  the  tears  would  come  to  his 
eyes  at  the  sight  of  mountains,  for  they  re- 
minded him  of  his  Virginian  home.  "Oh, 
Charlie,"  he  said  once  to  his  valet,  as  he  sat 
crippled  in  a  wheel-chair  in  a  Southern  hotel, 
"how  I  wish  I  could  get  on  a  horse  and  ride  on 
through  those  mountains  once  again!" 

McCormick  was  not  in  any  sense  a  Grad- 
grind  of  commercialism  —  a  man  who  enriched 
his  coffers  by  the  impoverishment  of  his  soul. 

[184] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

He  made  money  —  ten  millions  or  more;  but 
he  did  so  incidentally,  just  as  a  man  makes 
muscle  by  doing  hard  work.  Several  of  his 
fellow  Chicagoans  had  swept  past  him  in  the 
million-making  race.  No  matter  how  much 
money  came  to  him,  he  was  the  same  man,  with 
the  same  friendships  and  the  same  purposes. 
And  it  is  inconceivable  that,  for  any  amount 
of  wealth,  he  would  have  changed  the  ground- 
plan  of  his  life. 

It  is  strictly  true  to  say  that  he  was  a  practical 
idealist.  He  idealized  the  American  Consti- 
tution, the  Patent  Office,  the  Courts,  the  Dem- 
ocratic Party,  and  the  Presbyterian  Church. 
He  was  an  Oliver  Cromwell  of  industry.  All 
his  beliefs  and  acts  sprang  from  a  few  simple 
principles  and  fitted  together  like  a  picture 
puzzle.  There  was  religion  in  his  business 
and  business  in  his  religion.  He  was  made 
such  as  he  was  by  the  Religious  Reformation 
of  Europe  and  the  Industrial  Revolution  of  the 
United  States.  He  was  all  of  one  piece  — 
sincere  and  self -consistent  —  a  type  of  the 
nineteenth-century  American  at  his  best.  He 

[185] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

was  not  sordid.  He  was  not  cynical.  He  was 
not  scientific.  He  was  a  man  of  faith  and 
works  —  one  of  the  old-fashioned  kind  who 
laid  the  foundations  and  built  the  walls  of 
this  republic. 

He  felt  that  he  was  born  into  the  world  with 
certain  things  to  do.  Some  of  these  things 
were  profitable  and  some  of  them  were  not,  but 
he  gave  as  much  energy  and  attention  to  the 
one  as  to  the  other.  In  1859,  for  instance,  he 
had  a  factory  that  was  profitable,  and  a  daily 
paper  and  a  college  that  were  expensive.  He 
was  struggling  to  extend  his  trade  at  home  and 
in  Europe,  to  protect  his  patents,  to  prevent 
the  war  between  the  North  and  South,  and  to 
maintain  the  simplicity  of  the  Presbyterian 
faith.  To  contend  for  these  interests  and 
principles  was  his  life.  He  could  not  have 
done  anything  else.  It  was  as  natural  for  him 
to  do  so  as  for  a  fish  to  swim  or  a  bird  to  fly. 
Once,  towards  the  end  of  his  life,  when  he  was 
sitting  in  his  great  arm-chair,  reflecting,  he  said 
to  his  wife,  "  Nettie,  life  is  a  battle."  He  made 
this  announcement  as  though  it  were  the  dis- 

[186] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

covery  of  a  new  fact.  All  his  life  he  had  been 
much  less  conscious  of  the  battle  itself  than  of 
the  cause  for  which  he  fought. 

In  1884  McCormick  died,  at  that  time  of  the 
year  when  wheat  is  being  sown  in  Spain  and 
reaped  in  Mexico.  The  earth-life  of  "the 
strong  personality  before  whom  obstacles  went 
down  as  swiftly  and  inevitably  as  grain  before 
the  knife  of  his  machines,"  was  ended.  His 
last  words,  spoken  in  a  moment's  awakening 
from  the  death-stupor,  were  —  "Work,  work!" 
Not  even  the  dissolution  of  his  body  could  relax 
the  fixity  of  his  will.  And  when  he  lay  in  state, 
in  his  Chicago  home,  there  was  a  Reaper, 
modelled  in  white  flowers,  at  his  feet;  and  upon 
his  breast  a  sheaf  of  the  ripe,  yellow  wheat, 
surmounted  by  a  crown  of  lilies.'  These  were 
the  emblems  of  the  work  that  had  been  given 
him  to  do,  and  the  evidence  of  its  completion. 


[187 


CHAPTER  XI 

THE  REAPER  AND  THE  NATION 
X  \  THEN  Cyrus  H.  McCormick  died  in  1884 
he  had  provided  hunger-insurance  for  the 
United  States  and  the  greater  part  of  the  civil- 
ized world.  In  that  year  his  own  factory  made 
50,000  harvesting  machines,  and  there  were  in 
use,  in  all  countries,  more  than  500,000  Mc- 
Cormick machines,  doing  the  work  of  5,000,000 
men  in  the  harvest  fields.  The  United  States 
was  producing  wheat  at  the  rate  of  ten  bushels 
per  capita,  instead  of  four,  as  it  had  been  in 
1847,  when  McCormick  built  his  first  factory  in 
Chicago.  And  the  total  production  of  wheat 
in  all  lands  was  2,240,000,000  bushels  — 
enough  to  give  an  abundance  of  food  to  325,- 
000,000  people. 

Chicago,  in  1884,  was  a  powerful  city  of  six 
hundred  thousand  population.  It  had  grown 
sixty-fold  since  McCormick  rode  into  it  by  stage 
in  1845.  It  had  3,519  manufacturing  estab- 
lishments, giving  work  to  80,000  men  and 

[188] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

women  and  producing  commodities  at  the  rate 
of  $5,000,000  worth  in  a  week.  It  was  then 
what  it  is  to-day  —  the  chief  Reaper  City  and 
principal  granary  of  the  world.  The  wheat 
and  flour  that  were  sent  out  from  its  ports 
and  depots  in  the  year  that  the  inventor  of  the 
Reaper  died  were  enough  to  make  ten  thousand 
million  loaves  of  bread,  which,  if  they  were 
fairly  distributed,  would  have  given  about  forty 
loaves  apiece  to  the  families  of  the  human  race. 
The  United  States,  in  1884,  had  been  for  six 
years  the  foremost  of  the  wheat-producing 
nations.  It  had  also  grown  to  be  first  in  mining, 
railroads,  telegraphs,  steel,  and  agriculture.  It 
was  the  land  of  the  highest  wages  and 
cheapest  bread  —  an  anomaly  that  foreign 
countries  could  not  understand.  In  the  bulk 
of  its  manufacturing,  it  had  forged  ahead  of  all 
other  nations,  even  of  Great  Britain;  and  yet, 
although  a  vast  army  of  men  had  been  drawn 
from  its  farms  to  its  factories,  it  had  produced 
in  that  year  more  than  half  a  billion  bushels  of 
wheat  —  six  times  as  much  as  its  crop  had  been 
in  the  best  year  of  the  sickle  and  the  scythe. 

[189] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

So,  in  the  span  of  his  business  life  —  from 
1831  to  1884, —  McCormick  had  seen  his  coun- 
try rise  from  insignificance  to  greatness,  and 
he  had  the  supreme  satisfaction  of  knowing  that 
his  Reaper  had  done  much,  if  not  most,  to 
accelerate  this  marvellous  progress.  As  we 
shall  see,  the  invention  of  the  Reaper  was  the 
right  starting-point  for  the  up-building  of  a 
republic.  It  made  all  other  progress  possible, 
by  removing  the  fear  of  famine  and  the  drudgery 
of  farm  labor.  It  enabled  even  the  laborer  of 
the  harvest-field  to  be  free  and  intelligent,  be- 
cause it  gave  him  the  power  of  ten  men. 

The  United  States  as  a  whole,  had  paid  no 
attention  to  the  Reaper  until  the  opening  of 
the  California  gold  mines  in  1849.  Then  the 
sudden  scarcity  of  laborers  created  a  panic 
among  the  farmers,  and  boomed  the  sale  of  all 
manner  of  farm  machinery.  Two  years  later 
the  triumph  of  the  McCormick  Reaper  at  the 
London  Exposition  was  a  topic  of  the  day  and 
a  source  of  national  pride.  And  in  1852  the 
Crimean  War  sent  the  price  of  wheat  skywards, 


190 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

providing  an  English  market  for  as  much  wheat 
as  American  farmers  could  sell. 

But  it  was  not  until  the  outbreak  of  the  Civil 
War  that  the  United  States  learned  to  really 
appreciate  the  Reaper.  By  the  time  that  Presi- 
dent Lincoln  had  made  his  ninth  call  for  soldiers, 
by  the  time  that  he  had  taken  every  third  man 
for  the  Northern  armies,  the  value  of  the  Reaper 
was  beyond  dispute.  By  a  strange  coincidence, 
in  this  duel  between  wheat  States  on  the  one 
side,  and  cotton  States  on  the  other,  it  was  a 
Northerner,  Eli  Whitney,  who  had  invented  the 
cotton-gin,  which  made  slavery  profitable;  and 
it  was  a  Southerner,  Cyrus  H.  McCormick,  who 
had  invented  the  Reaper,  which  made  the 
Northern  States  wealthy  and  powerful. 

It  was  the  Reaper-power  of  the  North  that 
offset  the  slave-power  of  the  South.  There 
were  as  many  Reapers  in  the  wheat-fields  of  1861 
as  could  do  the  work  of  a  million  slaves.  As 
the  war  went  on,  the  crops  in  the  Northern  States 
increased.  Europe  refused  to  believe  such  a 
miracle;  but  it  was  true.  Fifty  million  bushels 

[191] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

of  American  grain  went  to  Europe  in  1861,  and 
fifty-six  million  bushels  in  the  following  year. 
More  than  two  hundred  million  bushels  were 
exported  during  the  four  years  of  the  war.  Thus 
the  Reaper  not  only  released  men  to  fight  for 
the  preservation  of  the  Union.  It  not  only  fed 
them  while  they  were  in  the  field.  It  did  more. 
It  saved  us  from  bankruptcy  as  well  as  famine, 
and  kept  our  credit  good  among  foreign  nations 
at  the  most  critical  period  in  our  history. 

After  the  Civil  War  came  the  settling  of  the 
West;  and  here  again  the  Reaper  was  indispens- 
able. In  most  cases  it  went  ahead  of  the  rail- 
road. The  first  Reaper  arrived  in  Chicago  three 
years  before  the  first  locomotive.  "We  had  a 
McCormick  Reaper  in  1856,"  said  James  Wil- 
son; "and  at  that  time  there  was  no  railroad 
within  seventy-five  miles  of  our  Iowa  farm.  The 
Reaper  worked  a  great  revolution,  enabling  one 
man  to  do  the  work  that  many  men  had  been 
doing,  and  do  it  better.  By  means  of  it  the  West 
became  a  thickly  settled  country,  able  to  feed 
the  nation  and  to  spare  bread  and  meat  for  the 
outside  world." 

[192] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

When  McCormick  was  a  boy,  more  wheat  was 
raised  in  Virginia  than  in  any  other  State.  But 
by  1860  Illinois  was  ahead,  and  by  degrees  the 
sceptre  of  the  wheat  empire  passed  westwards, 
until  to-day  it  is  held  by  Minnesota.  What  with 
the  Homestead  Act  of  1862,  and  the  offer  of 
McCormick  and  the  other  Reaper  manufacturers 
to  sell  machines  to  the  farmers  on  credit,  it  was 
possible  for  poor  men,  without  capital,  to  be- 
come each  the  owner  of  160  acres  of  land,  and 
to  harvest  its  grain  without  spending  a  penny 
in  wages.  Thus  the  immense  area  of  the  West 
became  a  populous  country,  with  cities  and 
railways  and  State  Governments,  and  producing 
one-tenth  of  the  wheat  of  the  world. 

The  enterprise  of  these  Western  farmers 
brought  in  the  present  era  of  farm  machinery. 
It  replaced  "the  man  with  the  hoe"  by  the  man 
with  the  self-binder  and  steel  plow  and  steam 
thresher.  It  wiped  out  the  old-time  drudge  of 
the  soil  from  American  farms,  and  put  in  his 
stead  the  new  farmer,  the  business  farmer,  who 
works  for  a  good  living  and  a  profit,  and  not  for 
a  bare  existence.  Such  men  as  Oliver  Dalrym- 

[193] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

pie,  of  North  Dakota,  led  the  way  by  dem- 
onstrating what  might  be  done  by  "bonanza 
farms."  This  doughty  Scottish- American  se- 
cured 30,000  acres  of  the  Red  River  Valley  in 
1876,  and  put  it  all  into  wheat.  It  was  such  a 
wheat-field  as  never  before  had  been  seen  in  any 
country.  The  soil  was  turned  with  150  gang 
plows,  sown  with  70  drills,  and  reaped  with  150 
self-binders.  Twelve  threshing-machines,  kept 
busy  in  the  midst  of  this  sea  of  yellow  grain,  beat 
out  the  straw  and  chaff  and  in  the  season  filled 
two  freight  trains  a  day  with  enough  wheat  in 
each  train  to  give  two  thousand  people  their 
daily  bread  for  a  year. 

Led  on  by  such  pathfinders,  American  farm- 
ers launched  out  bravely,  until  now  they  are 
using  very  nearly  a  billion  dollars'  worth  of 
labor-saving  machinery.  The  whole  level  of 
farm  life  has  been  raised.  It  has  been  lifted 
from  muscle  to  mind.  The  use  of  machinery 
has  created  leisure  and  capital,  and  these  two 
have  begotten  intelligence,  education,  science,  so 
that  the  farmer  of  to-day  lives  in  a  new  world, 
and  is  a  wholly  different  person  from  what 

[194] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

he  was  when  Cyrus  McCormick  learned  to 
till  the  soil. 

This  elevation  of  the  farmer  is  now  seen  to  be 
our  best  guarantee  of  prosperity  and  national 
permanence.  It  was  the  incoming  flood  of 
wheat  money  that  put  the  United  States  on  its 
feet  as  a  manufacturing  nation.  The  total 
amount  of  this  money,  from  the  building  of  the 
first  McCormick  Reaper  factory  until  to-day,  is 
the  unthinkable  sum  of  $5,500,000,000,  which 
may  be  taken  as  the  net  profit  of  the  Reaper  to 
the  nation. 

Thus  the  Reaper  was  not,  like  the  wind-mill, 
for  instance,  a  mere  convenience  to  the  farmer 
himself.  It  was  the  link  between  the  city  and 
the  country.  It  directly  benefited  all  bread- 
eaters,  and  put  the  whole  nation  upon  a  higher 
plane.  It  built  up  cities,  and  made  them  safe, 
for  the  reason  that  they  were  not  surrounded  by 
hordes  of  sickle-and-flail  serfs,  who  would  sooner 
or  later  rise  up  in  the  throe  of  a  hunger-revolu- 
tion and  pull  down  the  cities  and  the  palaces  into 
oblivion.  When  the  first  Reaper  was  sold,  in 
1840,  only  eight  per  cent  of  Americans  lived  in 

[195] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

towns  and  cities;  and  to-day  the  proportion 
is  forty  per  cent.  Yet  bread  is  cheaper  and 
more  plentiful  now  than  it  was  then;  and  there 
is  the  most  genial  and  good-natured  co-opera- 
tion between  those  who  live  among  paved 
streets  and  those  who  live  in  the  midst  of  the 
green  and  yellow  wheat-fields.  There  are  no 
Goths  and  Vandals  on  American  farms. 

Instead  of  the^tiny  log  workshop  on  the  Mc- 
Cormick  farm,  in  which  the  first  crude  Reaper 
was  laboriously  hammered  and  whittled  into 
shape,  there  is  now  a  McCormick  City  in  the 
heart  of  Chicago  —  the  oldest  and  largest  Har- 
vester plant  in  the  world.  In  sixty-two  years 
of  its  life,  this  plant  has  produced  five  or  six 
millions  of  harvesting  machines,  and  it  is  still 
pouring  them  out  at  the  rate  of  7,000  a  week.  If 
it  were  to  ship  its  yearly  output  at  one  time,  it 
would  require  a  railway  caravan  of  14,000 
freight-cars  to  carry  the  machines  from  the 
factory  to  the  farmers. 

This  McCormick  City  is  one  of  the  industrial 
wonders  that  America  exhibits  to  visiting  for- 
eigners, and  it  is  so  vast  that  it  can  only  be 

[196] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

glanced  at  in  a  day.  It  covers  229  acres  of  land. 
In  its  buildings  there  is  enough  flooring  to  cover 
a  90-acre  farm,  and  if  they  were  all  made  over 
into  one  long  building,  twenty-five  feet  wide  and 
one  story  high,  it  would  be  very  nearly  forty 
miles  long,  as  far  as  from  Chicago  to  Joliet. 
The  population  of  McCormick  City,  counting 
workers  only,  is  7,000,  whose  average  wages 
are  $2.20  a  day. 

Here  you  will  find  a  mammoth  twine-mill  — 
the  largest  of  its  kind  in  any  country.  Into  this 
mill  come  the  bright  yellow  sisal  fibres  from 
Yucatan  and  the  manila  fibres  from  the  Philip- 
pines. These  fibres  are  cleaned  and  strewn 
upon  endless  chains  of  combs,  which  jerk  and 
pull  the  fibres  and  finally  deliver  them  to  spindles 
-  1,680  spindles,  which  whirl  and  twist  19,000 
miles  of  twine  in  the  course  of  a  single  day, 
almost  enough  to  put  a  girdle  around  the 
earth.  Most  of  this  work  is  done  by  Polish 
girls  and  women,  who  are  being  displaced  as 
farm  laborers  in  their  own  country  by  American 
harvesting  machines. 

This   plant  is  so  vast  that  from  one  point  of 

[197] 


CYRUS      HALL       McCORMIC.K 

view  it  seems  to  be  mainly  a  foundry.  Thou- 
sands of  tons  of  iron  —  88,000  tons,  to  be  exact, 
—  pour  out  of  its  furnaces  every  year  and  are 
moulded  into  113,000,000  castings.  But  from 
another  pqint  of  view  it  appears  to  be  a  carpenter 
shop.  In  its  yard  stand  as  many  piles  of  lum- 
ber as  would  build  a  fair-sized  city  —  60,000,- 
000  feet  of  it,  cut  in  the  forests  of  Mississippi 
and  Missouri.  And  so  much  of  this  lumber  is 
being  sawed,  planed,  and  shaped  in  the  various 
wood-working  shops  that  eight  sawdust-fed 
furnaces  are  needed  to  supply  them  with  power. 
The  marvels  of  labor-saving  machinery  are 
upon  every  hand,  in  this  McCormick  City. 
The  paint-tank  has  replaced  the  paint-brush. 
Instead  of  painting  wheels  by  hand,  for  instance, 
ten  of  them  are  now  strung  on  a  pole,  like  beads 
on  a  string,  and  soused  into  a  bath  from  which 
they  come,  one  minute  later,  resplendent  in 
suits  of  red  or  blue.  The  labor-cost  of  painting 
these  ten  wheels  is  two  cents.  Guard-fingers, 
for  which  McCormick  paid  twenty-four  cents 
apiece  in  1845,  are  now  produced  with  a  labor- 
cost  of  two  cents  a  dozen.  And  as  for  bolls, 

[198] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

with  two  cents  you  can  pay  for  the  making  of 
a  hundred.  Both  bolts  and  nuts  are  shaped  by 
automatic  machines  which  are  so  simple  that 
a  boy  can  operate  five  at  once,  and  so  swift  that 
other  boys  with  wheelbarrows  are  kept  busy 
carrying  away  their  finished  product. 

There  is  one  specially  designed  machine,  with 
a  battery  of  augurs,  which  bores  twenty-one 
holes  at  once,  thus  saving  four-fifths  of  a  cent 
per  board.  Another  special  machine  shapes 
poles  and  saves  one  cent  per  pole.  Such  tiny 
economies  appear  absurd,  until  the  immense 
output  is  taken  into  account.  Whoever  can 
reduce  the  costs  in  the  McCormick  plant  one 
cent  per  machine,  adds  thereby  $3,500  a  year 
to  the  profits,  and  helps  to  make  it  possible  for 
a  farmer  to  buy  a  magical  self-binder,  built 
up  of  3,800  parts,  for  less  than  the  price  of  a 
good  horse,  or  for  as  much  wheat  as  he  can 
grow  in  one  season  on  a  dozen  acres. 

The  vast  McCormick  City  has  its  human  side, 
too,  in  spite  of  all  its  noise  and  semi-automatic 
machinery.  Cyrus  McCormick  was  not  one  of 
those  employers  who  call  their  men  by  numbers 

[199] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

instead  of  names,  and  who  have  no  more  regard 
for  flesh  and  blood  than  for  iron  and  steel. 
He  had  worked  with  his  hands  himself,  and 
brought  up  his  sons  to  do  the  same.  The 
feeling  of  loyalty  and  friendliness  between  the 
McCormick  family  and  their  employees  has 
from  the  first  been  unusually  strong.  In  1902, 
at  the  suggestion  of  Stanley  McCormick,  gifts 
to  the  amount  of  $1,500,000  were  made  to  the 
oldest  employees  of  the  business,  as  rewards  for 
faithful  service  and  tokens  of  good-will.  Also, 
a  handsome  club-house  was  built  for  the  comfort 
of  the  men  of  the  McCormick  City,  and  a 
rest-room  for  the  women,  under  the  mothering 
superintendence  of  a  matron  and  trained  nurse. 
But  this  one  McCormick  City,  immense  as 
it  is,  does  not  by  any  means  represent  the  sum 
total  of  McCormick's  legacy  to  the  United 
States.  As  the  founder  of  the  harvesting- 
machine  business,  he  deserves  credit  for  an  in- 
dustry which  now  represents  an  investment  of 
about  $150,000,000.  With  the  sole  exception 
of  the  Australian  stripper,  every  wheat-reaping 
machine  is  still  made  on  the  lines  laid  down  by 

[200] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         W.ORK 

McCormick  in  1831.  New  improvements  have 
been  adopted;  but  not  one  of  his  seven  factors 
has  been  thrown  aside. 

Fully  two-thirds  of  this  industry  is  still  being 
done  by  the  United  States,  although  four-fifths 
of  the  wheat  is  grown  in  other  countries.  Our 
national  income,  from  this  one  item  of  harvest- 
ing machinery,  has  risen  to  $30,000,000  a  year 
—  more  than  we  derive  from  the  exportation 
of  any  other  American  invention.  No  European 
country,  apparently,  has  been  able  to  master 
the  complexities  and  multifarious  details  which 
abound  in  a  successful  harvester  business. 

In  1902  the  efficiency  of  the  larger  American 
plants  was  greatly  increased  by  the  organization 
of  the  International  Harvester  Company,  which 
has  its  headquarters  in  Chicago.  The  McCor- 
mick City  is  the  most  extensive  plant  in  this 
Company,  and  McCormick's  son  —  who  is  also 
Cyrus  H.  McCormick  —  is  its  President.  In 
this  Company  sixteen  separate  plants  are  co- 
ordinated, four  of  these  being  in  foreign  coun- 
tries. Its  yearly  output  averages  about  $75,- 
000,000  in  value;  and  in  bulk  is  great  enough 

[  201 1 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

to  fill  65,000  freight-cars.  It  has  25,000  work- 
men and  35,000  agents.  The  lumber  with 
which  its  yards  are  filled  comes  from  its  own 
80,000-acre  forest;  the  steel  comes  from  its 
own  furnaces  and  the  iron  ore  from  its  own 
mines.  It  is  so  overwhelmingly  vast,  this  new 
famine-fighting  consolidation,  that  the  value  of 
its  output  for  one  hour  is  greater  than  the 
$25,000  of  capital  with  which  McCormick  built 
his  first  factory  in  Chicago. 

So,  it  is  evident  that  the  McCormick  Reaper 
has  been  an  indispensable  factor  in  the  making 
of  America.  Without  it,  we  could  never  have 
had  the  America  of  to-day.  It  has  brought  good, 
and  nothing  but  good,  to  every  country  that  has 
accepted  it.  It  has  never  been,  and  never  can 
be,  put  to  an  evil  use.  It  cannot,  under  any 
system  of  government,  benefit  the  few  and  not 
the  many.  It  is  as  democratic  in  its  nature  as 
the  American  Constitution;  and  in  every  foreign 
country  where  it  cuts  the  grain,  it  is  an  educator 
as  well  as  a  machine,  giving  to  the  masses  of 
less  fortunate  lands  an  object-lesson  in  democ- 
racy and  the  spirit  of  American  progress. 

[202] 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE    REAPER  AND   THE   WORLD 

T  Ti  TE  shall  now  see  what  the  invention  of  the 
^  *  Reaper  means  to  the  human  race  as  a 
whole.  We  shall  leave  behind  McCormick  and 
the  United  States,  and  survey  the  field  from  a 
higher  standpoint.  The  selection  of  wheat  as 
the  first  world-food,  —  its  abundance  made 
possible  by  the  Reaper  —  its  transportation  by 
railroads  and  steamships  —  its  storage  in  elevat- 
ors —  the  production  of  flour  —  the  growth  of 
wheat-banks,  wheat-ports,  and  exchanges  —  the 
new  wheat  empires  —  the  international  mech- 
anism of  marketing  —  the  conquest  of  famine 
and  the  stupendous  possibilities  of  the  future! 
These  are  the  subjects  that  group  themselves 
under  the  general  title  -  -  The  Reaper  and  the 
World. 

To  find  a  world-food, -- that  was  the  begin- 
ning of  the  problem.  All  human  beings  wake 
up  hungry  every  morning  of  their  lives ;  and  con- 
sequently the  first  necessity  of  the  day  is  food. 

[  203  1 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

The  search  for  food  is  the  oldest  of  instincts. 
It  is  the  master-motive  of  evolution.  It  has 
reared  empires  up  and  thrown  them  down.  As 
Buckle  has  showrn,  where  the  national  food  is 
cheap  and  plentiful,  population  increases  more 
rapidly.  And  as  Sir  James  Crichton-Browne, 
in  a  recent  book  on  "Parcimony  in  Nutrition," 
maintains,  the  lack  of  food  is  a  prolific  cause  of 
war,  disease,  and  social  misery  in  its  various 
forms.  "Nothing  is  more  demoralizing,"  he 
says,  "than  chronic  hunger." 

"For  lack  of  bread  the  French  Revolution 
failed,"  said  Prince  Krapotkin.  For  lack  of 
bread  the  opium  traffic  flourishes  in  India  and 
China;  the  secret  of  the  prevalence  of  opium  is 
that  the  natives  use  it  to  prevent  hunger-pangs 
in  time  of  famine.  Once  let  those  countries 
have  cheap  bread,  and  there  may  be  no  more 
opium  sold  there  than  there  is  to-day  in  Kansas. 
For  lack  of  bread  came  the  war  between  Russia 
and  Japan;  what  the  one  nation  wanted  was  a 
seaport  for  the  grain  of  Siberia,  and  what  the 
other  wanted  was  more  land  for  the  support  of 
her  swarming  population.  For  lack  of  bread 

[204] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

have  come  most  of  the  crimes  of  greed  and 
violence,  —  most  of  the  social  systems  based  on 
sordid  self-interest,  most  of  the  ill-humor  that 
has  postponed  the  coming  of  an  era  of  peace  on 
earth  and  good-will  among  men. 

Now,  of  the  three  main  foods  of  the  human 
race,  flesh,  rice,  and  wheat,  wheat  is  the  best 
suited  to  be  a  world-food.  Flesh  becomes  too 
expensive  once  the  wild  game  of  the  forests  is 
destroyed;  and  it  is  not  suitable  for  food  in 
tropical  countries.  Rice,  on  the  other  hand,  is. 
not  a  flesh-forming  food,  and  so  is  not  suited 
for  food  in  cold  countries.  Wheat  is  the  one 
food  that  is  universal,  as  good  for  the  Esquimaux 
as  for  the  South  Sea  Islander.  It  is  not  easily 
spoiled,  as  milk  and  fruits  are;  and  it  contains 
all  the  elements  that  are  needed  by  the  body  and 
in  just  about  the  right  proportion. 

Wheat,  to  the  botanist,  is  a  grass  —  "a  de- 
graded lily,"  to  quote  from  Grant  Allen.  It 
was  originally  a  flower  that  was  tamed  by  man 
and  trained  from  beauty  to  usefulness.  We  do 
not  know  when  or  where  the  prehistoric  Bur- 
bank  lived  who  undertook  this  education  of  the 

[205] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

wheat-lily.  But  we  do  know  that  wheat  has 
been  a  food  for  at  least  five  thousand  years. 
We  find  it  in  the  oldest  tombs  of  Egypt  and 
pictured  on  the  stones  of  the  Pyramids.  We 
know  that  Solomon  sent  wheat  as  a  present 
to  his  friend,  the  King  of  Tyre;  and  we  have 
reason  to  believe  that  its  first  appearance  was 
in  the  valley  of  the  Tigris  and  the  Euphrates, 
near  where  the  ancient  city  of  Babylon  rose 
to  greatness. 

Wheat  is  not  a  wild  weed.  It  is  a  tame  and 
transient  plant  —  a  plant  of  civilization.  It 
could  not.  continue  to  exist  without  man,  and 
man,  perhaps,  could  not  exist  except  in  the 
tropical  countries  without  wheat.  Each  needs 
the  other.  If  the  human  race  were  to  perish 
from  the  face  of  the  earth,  wheat  might  survive 
for  three  years,  but  no  longer.  So  close  has 
this  co-operation  been  between  wheat  and  civil- 
ized man,  that  an  eminent  German  writer,  Dr. 
Gerland,  maintains  with  a  wealth  of  evidence 
that  wheat  was  the  original  cause  of  civilization, 
partly  because  it  was  the  first  good  and  plentiful 
food,  and  partly  because  it  was  wheat  that 

[206] 


Chart  Showing  Relative  Distribution  of  Values  by 
Producing  Countries  in  1908  of  World's  Produc- 
tion of  Five  Principal  Grains.    Approxi- 
mate Value,  $9,280,000,000 


Chart  Showing  Relative  Values  in  1908  of  World's 

Production  of  the  Five  Principal  Grains. 

Approximate  Value,  $9,280,000,000 


" 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

persuaded  primitive  man  to  forsake  his  wars  and 
his  wanderings  and  to  learn  the  peaceful  habits 
of  agriculture. 

In  any  case,  whatever  its  earlier  history  may 
have  been,  wheat  is  to-day  the  chief  food  of  the 
civilized  races  of  mankind.  It  is  the  main 
support  of  600,000,000  people.  It  has  over- 
come its  natural  enemies  —  weeds,  fungus 
diseases,  insects,  and  drought,  —  and  attained 
a  crop  total  of  3,500,000,000  bushels  a  year. 
To  the  intelligent,  purposeful  nations  that  have 
become  the  masters  of  the  human  race,  wheat 
is  now  the  staff  of  life,  the  milk  of  Mother  Earth, 
the  essence  of  soil  and  air  and  rain  and  sunshine. 

But,  although  wheat  was  known  to  be  the 
best  food  for  fifty  centuries,  it  did  not  until  very 
recently,  until  thirty  or  forty  years  ago,  become 
a  world-food.  Every  community  ate  up  its  own 
w^heat.  It  had  little  or  none  to  sell,  because,  no 
matter  how  much  grain  the  farmers  planted, 
they  could  not  in  the  eight  or  ten  days  of  harvest 
gather  more  than  a  certain  limited  quantity  into 
their  barns.  All  that  one  man  could  do,  with 
his  wife  to  help  him,  was  to  snatch  in  enough 

[207] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

wheat  to  feed  ten  people  for  a  year.  Each 
family  could  do  no  more  than  feed  one  other 
family  and  itself.  This  was  the  Tragedy  of 
the  Wheat.  There  was  never  enough  of  it.  It 
was  so  precious  that  none  could  be  sure  of  it 
except  the  kings  and  the  nobilities.  As  for  the 
masses  of  peasantry  who  sowed  the  wheat  and 
reaped  it  with  hand-sickles,  they  would  almost 
as  soon  have  thought  of  wearing  diamonds  as 
of  eating  white  bread. 

Then,  in  1831,  came  the  Reaper.  It  was  not 
invented  in  any  of  the  older  countries,  nor  in 
any  of  the  great  cities  of  the  world.  For  five 
thousand  years  neither  the  peasants  nor  the 
kings  had  conceived  of  any  better  way  of  reap- 
ing wheat  than  with  the  sickle  and  the  scythe. 
/The  man  who  had  cut  the  Gordian  knot  of 
/  Famine  was  the  son  of  a  citizen-farmer,  Cyrus 
Hall  McCormick  by  name,  Scotch-Irish  by  race, 
American  by  birth,  and  inventor  by  heredity 
Vand  early  training. 

This  new  machine,  the  Reaper,  when  it  was 
full-grown  into  the  self-binder,  was  equal  to 
forty  sickles.  With  one  man  to  drive  it,  it 

[208] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

could  cut  and  bind  enough  wheat  in  one  season 
to  feed  four  hundred  people.  In  its  most  highly 
developed  form,  the  combined  harvester  and 
thresher,  it  has  become  so  gigantic  a  machine 
that  thirty-two  horses  are  required  to  haul  it. 
This  leviathan  cuts  a  fifty-foot  roadway  through 
the  grain,  threshes  it  and  bags  it  at  the  rate  of 
one  bag  every  half-minute.  And  the  total  world 
production  of  Reapers  of  every  sort  —  self- 
binders,  mowers,  headers,  corn-binders,  etc., — 
is  probably  as  many  as  1,500,000  a  year,  two- 
thirds  of  them  being  made  in  the  United  States. 
Because  of  this  harvesting  machinery,  the 
wheat  crop  of  the  world  is  now  nearly  twice 
what  it  was  in  1879.  The  American  crop  has 
multiplied  six  and  a  half  times  in  fifty  years. 
Western  Canada,  Australia,  Siberia,  and  Argen- 
tina have  become  wheat  producers.  The  cost  of 
growing  one  bushel  in  America,  with  machinery 
and  high  wages,  is  now  about  half  a  dollar, 
which  is  less  than  the  cost  in  Europe  and  as  low 
as  the  cost  in  India,  where  laborers  can  be 
hired  for  a  few  pennies  a  day.  With  a  sickle, 
the  time-cost  of  a  bushel  of  wheat  was  three 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

hours;  with  a  self-binder,  it  is  now  ten  minutes. 
And  so,  because  of  these  amazing  results,  the 
rattle  of  the  harvester  has  become  an  indispen- 
sable part  of  the  music  of  our  industrial  orches- 
tra, harmonious  with  the  click  of  the  telegraph 
key,  the  ring  of  the  telephone  bell,  the  hum  of 
the  sewing-machine,  the  roar  of  the  Bessemer 
converter,  the  gong  of  the  trolley,  the  whistle 
of  the  steamboat,  and  the  puff  of  the  locomotive. 
Next  to  the  Reaper,  the  most  important  fac- 
tors in  this  world-mechanism  of  the  bread,  are 
the  Railroad  and  the  Steamboat.  These  ar- 
rived on  the  scene  just  at  the  right  time  to  dis- 
tribute the  surplus  that  the  Reaper  produced. 
The  Steamboat,  and  its  humble  relative,  the 
barge,  came  first.  The  Erie  Canal  of  1825, 
the  Suez  Canal  of  1869,  and  the  Sault  Ste. 
Marie  Canal  of  1881,  were  built  largely  for 
the  carrying  of  the  wheat.  By  1856  wheat  was 
on  its  way  from  Chicago  to  Europe;  and  four 
years  later  the  first  wheat-ship  curved  around 
Cape  Horn  from  California.  Ten  years  ago 
an  entirely  new  kind  of  ship,  a  sort  of  immense 
steel  bag  called  a  "whaleback,"  was  built  to 

[210] 


HIS          LIFE         AN'D         WORK 

carry  250,000  bushels  of  wheat  in  a  single  load. 
By  this  means  a  ton  of  wheat  is  actually  carried 
thirteen  miles  for  one  cent.  There  are  to-day 
small  barges  on  the  canals  of  Holland,  large  ones 
on  the  river  Volga,  and  several  thousand  steam- 
ships on  the  world's  main  water-ways,  all  carry- 
ing burdens  of  wheat.  Enough  is  now  being 
transported  from  port  to  port  to  give  steady 
work  to  fully  three  hundred  steamships  and 
summer  work  to  very  nearly  as  many  more. 
There  was  an  exciting  contest  between  the 
ship  and  the  car  in  the  earlier  days  of  transpor- 
tation, to  see  which  should  carry  the  largest 
share  of  the  wheat.  About  1869  the  car  won. 
In  this  year,  too,  the  United  States  was  belted 
with  a  railway,  east  to  west,  which  meant  the 
opening  up  of  the  first  great  wheat-empire. 
Other  railways  pushed  out  into  the  vast  prairies 
of  the  West,  lured  by  the  call  of  the  wheat. 
They  were  the  pioneers  of  the  world's  wheat- 
railways.  Wheat  was  their  chief  freight  and 
wheat  farmers  were  their  chief  passengers.  At 
the  outset  the  grain  was  shipped  in  bags.  Then 
some  railway  genius  invented  the  grain-car, 


CYRUS      HALL      M  c   C    O    R    M    I    C    K 

which  holds  as  much  as  twenty  or  twenty-five 
wagons.  And  to-day  one  of  the  ordinary  mov- 
ing pictures  of  an  American  railroad  is  a  sixty- 
car  train  travelling  eastward  with  enough  \vheat 
in  its  rolling  bins  to  give  bread  to  a  city  of  ten 
thousand  people  for  a  year. 

The  trans-Siberian  railway,  which  is  the 
longest  straight  line  of  steel  in  the  world,  was 
built  largely  as  a  wheat-conveyor.  So  were  the 
railways  of  western  Canada,  Argentina,  and 
India.  Ever  since  the  advent  of  the  Reaper 
wheat  has  been  the  prolific  mother  of  railways 
and  steamships.  While  the  rice  nations  are 
still  putting  their  burdens  on  ox-carts  and  on 
the  backs  of  camels  and  elephants,  the  wheat 
nations  have  built  up  a  system  of  transportation 
that  is  a  daily  miracle  of  cheapness,  efficiency, 
and  speed.  This  system  is  not  yet  finished. 
A  new  line  of  steamships  is  about  to  be  set  afloat 
between  Buenos  Ayres  and  Hamburg.  The 
Erie  Canal  is  being  re-made,  at  a  fabulous  cost, 
so  that  a  steamer  with  100,000  bushels  of  wheat 
can  go  directly  from  Buffalo  to  New  York. 
And  an  adventurous  railway  is  now  pushing  its 

[212] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

way  north  from  the  wheat-fields  of  western 
Canada  to  the  unknown  water  of  Hudson  Bay, 
whence  the  wheat  will  be  carried  by  boat  to 
London  and  Liverpool. 

To-day  it  is  not  the  long  haul  of  wheat,  .but 
the  short  haul,  that  is  more  expensive.  It  is 
cheaper  to  carry  wheat  from  one  country  to 
another  than  from  the  barn  to  the  nearest  town. 
The  average  distance  that  an  American  farmer 
has  to  haul  his  grain  is  nine  and  a  half  miles, 
and  the  average  cost  of  haulage  is  nine  cents  per 
hundred  pounds.  Thus  it  has  actually  become 
true  that  to  carry  wheat  ten  miles  by  wagon 
costs  more  than  2,300  miles  by  steamship. 
Such  is  the  tense  efficiency  of  our  wheat-carrier 
system  that  a  bushel  of  grain  can  now  be  picked 
up  in  Missouri  and  sent  to  the  cotton-spinners 
of  England  for  a  dime. 

Associated  with  this  transportation  problem 
was  the  matter  of  storage.  There  was  no  sort 
of  a  building  known  to  man,  fifty  years  ago,  in 
which  a  million  bushels  of  wheat  might  be  con- 
veniently kept.  An  entirely  new  kind  of  build- 
ing had  to  be  invented.  All  the  wheat  barns 

[213] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMlCK 

were  overflowing.  All  the  warehouses  were 
outgrown.  The  difficulty  was  to  make  a  huge 
building  that  could  be  quickly  rilled  and  emptied. 
Then,  at  the  precise  moment  when  he  was 
needed,  an  inventor,  F.  H.  Peavey,  appeared 
with  a  device  for  elevating  grain  —  an  endless 
carrier  to  which  metal  cups  were  fastened. 
From  this  idea  the  elevator  was  born. 

The  first  city  that  appreciated  the  usefulness 
of  this  new,  unlovely  building  was  Chicago.  It 
became  not  only  the  home  of  the  Reaper,  but 
also  the  main  storehouse  of  the  wheat.  It 
erected  one  after  another  of  these  mastodonic 
buildings  until  to-day  thirty-six  of  them  stand 
along  the  water-front,  roomy  enough  to  hold 
the  entire  crop  of  Holland,  Sweden,  Greece, 
Egypt,  Mexico,  and  New  Zealand.  What  these 
immense  grain-bins  have  done  for  the  prosperity 
of  Chicago  would  require  many  books  to  tell 
completely.  It  was  largely  because  of  them 
that  Chicago  outgrew  Berlin  and  became  the 
central  metropolis  of  North  America,  with 
twenty-six  railways  emptying  their  freight  at 

[214] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

her  doors  and  seven  thousand  vessels  a  year 
arriving  at  her  harbor. 

At  present  Chicago  has  swung  from  wheat 
to  corn  and  oats,  and  enabled  Minneapolis  to 
become  the  greatest  actual  wheat-storage  city 
of  the  world.  In  Minneapolis  the  owning  of 
elevators  has  become  a  profession.  There  are 
not  only  forty-four  elevators  in  the  city  itself, 
but  also  forty  elevator  companies  that  have 
built  more  than  two  thousand  elevators  in  the 
wheat  States  of  the  Northwest.  The  Jumbo 
of  all  elevators  is  here  —  a  stupendous  granary 
that  holds  6,000,000  bushels,  as  much  as  may 
be  reaped  by  two  thousand  self-binders  from 
seven  hundred  square  miles  of  land. 

Of  all  American  cities,  there  are  only  five 
others  that  can  put  roofs  over  10,000,000  bushels 
of  grain.  Duluth-Superior  stands  at  the  head 
of  these,  with  twice  the  storage  capacity  of 
New  York.  This  double  city,  with  the  pictur- 
esque location,  Duluth  on  her  Minnesota  hill- 
side and  Superior  on  her  Wisconsin  plain,  has 
in  recent  years  overtaken  all  competitors  and 

[215] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

is  now  the  leading  wheat-shipping  port  in  the 
world.  Buffalo  comes  next  as  an  elevator  city, 
having  twenty-eight  towering  buildings  of  steel 
operated  by  the  energy  of  Niagara  Falls.  Even 
this  famous  cataract  helps  a  little  in  the  making 
of  cheap  bread.  New  York  follows  closely  after 
Buffalo;  with  Kansas  City  and  St.  Louis  run- 
ning neck  and  neck  at  quite  a  distance  behind. 
It  is  an  odd  fact  that  there  is  not  one  elevator 
on  the  Pacific  coast.  Because  of  the  rainless 
weather,  the  wheat  is  put  into  bags  and  piled 
outdoors  until  the  day  of  shipment.  This  is  an 
expensive  method  of  handling,  as  the  bags  cost 
four  cents  apiece  and  no  machine  has  as  yet 
been  invented  that  will  pick  up  and  handle  a 
sack  of  grain. 

The  American  elevator  has  now  been  very 
generally  adopted  as  the  ideal  wheat-bin. 
Two  Roumanian  cities,  Braila  and  Galatz, 
have  suggested  an  improvement  by  using  con- 
crete instead  of  steel.  And  one  Russian  city, 
Novorossisk,  on  the  Black  Sea,  has  introduced 
a  most  original  feature  in  the  building  of  ele- 
vators by  erecting  a  very  large  one  a  quarter  of 

[216] 


HIS         LIFE         AND          WORK 

a  mile  back  from  the  dock,  because  of  the 
better  view  that  this  site  affords  of  the  harbor. 
London  has  no  elevators,  and  never  has  had, 
although  it  buys  more  wheat  than  any  other 
city.  It  has  six  million  mouths  to  feed,  so  that 
the  grain  is  devoured  as  fast  as  it  arrives.  To 
give  bread  to  London  would  take  the  entire 
crop  of  Indiana  or  Siberia.  Neither  are  there 
any  elevators  of  any  importance  in  Paris,  Ber- 
lin, or  Antwerp.  Whatever  wheat  arrives  at 
these  cities  is  either  hurried  to  the  mill  or  re- 
shipped.  Wheat  is  too  precious  in  Europe  to 
be  stored  for  a  year  or  for  two  years,  as  may 
happen  in  Minnesota.  Rotterdam  has  one 
elevator  only  and  of  moderate  size.  Neither 
Odessa  nor  Sulina  have  any  of  the  large  pro- 
portions, for  the  reasons  that  in  Odessa  the 
labor  unions  have  an  unconquerable  prejudice 
against  elevators,  and  in  Sulina  the  grain  is 
held  only  a  short  time  and  then  forwarded  else- 
where. This  Sulina,  as  a  glance  at  the  map 
of  Europe  will  show,  is  the  loneliest  of  all  the 
wheat-cities.  It  stands  on  a  heap  of  gravel  at 
the  mouth  of  the  Danube  —  an  oasis  of  human 

[217] 


CYRUS       HALL       McCORMICK 

life  in  a  vast  marshy  wilderness.  The  children 
born  there  have  never  seen  a  railway;  but  1,400 
ships  leave  the  stone  docks  of  Sulina  every  year 
laden  with  enough  wheat  to  feed  London,  Paris, 
and  Berlin.  To  find  the  exact  reverse  of  Su- 
lina, we  must  go  to  Buenos  Ay  res  —  the  premier 
wheat-city  of  South  America  and  the  gayest  of 
them  all.  Built  up  at  first  by  the  cattle  trade, 
and  now  depending  mainly  upon  wheat,  this 
superb  city  has  become  the  topmost  pinnacle 
of  South  American  luxury  and  refinement.  It 
has  several  new  elevators,  erected  by  the  rail- 
way companies. 

After  the  Reaper,  the  Railway,  the  Steam- 
ship, and  the  Elevator,  came  the  Exchange. 
This,  too,  came  first  in  Chicago,  in  its  modern 
form.  There  was  one  little  grain  Exchange  in 
the  Italian  city  of  Genoa,  several  centuries  ago, 
and  England  points  back  to  1747  as  the  year 
when  her  first  Corn  Exchange  was  born.  But 
it  was  the  Exchange  in  Chicago,  started  by 
thirteen  men  in  1848,  that  first  came  into 
its  full  growth  and  became  an  arena  of  inter- 
national forces. 

[218] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

A  wheat  Exchange  is  to-day  much  more  than 
a  meeting-place  for  brokers.  It  is  a  mechan- 
ism. It  is  a  news  bureau  —  a  parliament  — 
a  part  of  the  whispering-gallery  of  the  world. 
It  not  only  provides  a  market  where  wheat  can 
at  once  be  bought  and  sold,  but  it  obtains  for 
both  buyer  and  seller  all  the  news  from  every- 
where about  the  wheat,  so  that  no  bargain  may 
be  made  in  the  dark.  Before  Exchanges  were 
organized  there  were  times  when  a  farmer 
would  drive  twenty  miles  to  the  nearest  town 
with  a  load  of  wheat,  and  find  no  one  to  buy  it. 
Even  in  Chicago,  in  the  early  forties,  a  farmer 
ran  the  risk  of  not  being  able  to  trade  his  wheat 
for  a  few  groceries. 

At  present,  when  a  buyer  or  a  seller  of  wheat 
arrives  at  an  Exchange,  he  goes  at  once  to  con- 
sult the  weather  map  of  the  day.  From  here 
he  passes  to  a  series  of  bulletin-boards,  which 
inform  him  of  the  arrival  or  outgo  of  wheat  at 
many  cities.  One  board  tells  him  the  visible 
supply  of  wheat  in  the  world,  so  that  he  can 
easily  ascertain,  if  he  wishes  to  do  so,  how  much 
bread  the  human  race  ate  last  week.  Other 

[219] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

boards  have  telegrams  and  cablegrams  of 
disaster  —  frost  in  Alberta,  hail  in  Minnesota, 
green  bug  in  Texas,  rust  in  Argentina,  drought 
in  Australia,  locusts  in  Siberia,  monsoon  in 
India,  and  chinch  bug  in  Missouri.  Good 
news  is  here,  too,  as  well  as  bad.  There  may 
be  reports  of  a  record-breaking  crop  in  Rou- 
mania,  an  opulent  rain  in  Kansas,  a  new  steam- 
ship line  from  Kurrachee  to  Liverpool,  and  the 
plowing  of  a  million  acres  of  new  land  in  west- 
ern Canada.  And  also  there  are,  of  course, 
the  records  of  the  latest  sales  and  prices  in 
other  Exchanges. 

Thus  the  farmer  can  not  only  find  a  ready 
buyer  for  his  wheat.  He  can,  by  means  of  a 
newspaper  or  a  telephone,  know  what  price  he 
ought  to  receive,  as  all  the  news  gathered  by  the 
Exchanges  is  freely  given  to  the  public.  Such 
is  the  perfection  of  the  news  mechanism  that 
has  been  built  up  around  the  marketing  of  the 
wheat,  that  before  a  Dakota  farmer  starts  out 
for  town  with  a  load  of  grain,  he  can  go  to  the 
telephone  under  his  own  roof  and  learn  the 

[220] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

prices  at  various  cities  and  the  world-conditions 
of  the  wheat  trade. 

The  paper  which  best  deserves  to  be  called 
the  official  journal  of  the  wheat  is  the  Corn 
Trade  News,  of  Liverpool;  and  the  building 
which  best  deserves  to  be  called  the  international 
headquarters  of  the  wheat  business  is  the  hand- 
some new  Baltic  Exchange,  near  by  the 
Bank  of  England  in  London.  This  Baltic 
market  is  so  practically  international,  in  fact, 
that  it  is  never  closed.  Whoever  wishes  to  buy 
or  sell  wheat  may  do  so  here  at  any  hour  of  the 
day  or  night.  There  are  no  days  in  this  build- 
ing and  no  seasons,  for  the  reason  that  it  is 
always  noonday  and  harvest-time  in  some  part 
of  the  world.  In  this  Baltic  Exchange,  too, 
there  is  now  a  nucleus  for  a  Wheat  Parliament, 
organized  under  the  name  of  the  Corn  Trade 
Association.  This  society  has  undertaken  to 
put  the  wheat  business  in  order,  by  establishing 
standard  contracts,  collecting  samples  of  all 
wheats,  arbitrating  disputes,  and  condemning 
all  dishonesties  of  whatever  sort. 

[221] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

As  wheat  Exchange  cities,  London,  Liver- 
pool, and  Chicago  outclass  all  others.  Neither 
Italy  nor  France  have  any  central  or  dominating 
market.  In  Paris,  Antwerp,  Hamburg,  and 
Amsterdam  the  Bourses,  as  the  Exchanges 
are  called,  are  public  buildings,  and  the  members 
of  each  Bourse  represent  the  local  situation 
and  nothing  more.  One  of  the  most  ambitious 
and  speculative  of  the  European  Exchanges  is 
the  one  at  Budapest,  which  stands  beside  a 
dainty  little  park  where  the  brokers  eat  their 
lunch  in  fine  weather;  and  the  youngest  of 
all  Exchanges  is  the  one  that  was  born  in  Buenos 
Ayres  in  1908,  representing  a  surplus  of  a  hun- 
dred million  bushels  a  year. 

Besides  the  brokers,  in  their  Exchanges,  there 
must  also  be  inspectors  in  the  marketing  of  the 
wheat.  In  some  countries  these  inspectors  are 
government  officers,  as  in  Germany  and  Canada; 
and  elsewhere  they  are  local  officials  or  private 
employees,  as  in  the  United  States.  A  carload 
of  wheat,  passing  from  Dakota  to  New  York, 
will  probably  have  from  three  to  six  inspections. 

Also,  the  insurance  agent  takes  his  place  in  the 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

circle  of  co-operation  when  the  wheat  begins  to 
move  from  barn  to  bakery.  He  insures  the 
wheat  in  the  elevators,  on  the  cars,  or  in  the 
steamships.  He  may  even  insure  it  against  hail 
and  tornadoes  while  it  is  growing.  It  is  so 
precious,  this  brown  seed,  that  we  watch  over 
every  step  of  its  progress. 

It  is  the  bankers'  busy  season,  too,  when  the 
wheat  begins  to  move.  The  marketing  of  the 
grain  ties  up  more  money  than  any  other  yearly 
event.  "It  threatens  us  with  disaster  every 
fall,"  said  one  of  the  Secretaries  of  the  Treasury, 
when  making  a  plea  for  a  more  elastic  currency. 
"We  ship  half  a  million  dollars  a  day  during 
harvest,"  said  the  president  of  a  Chicago  bank. 
"We  drew  more  than  five  millions  of  currency 
from  the  East  and  sent  thirty-eight  millions  to 
the  country  during  September  and  October  of 
last  year,"  said  a  third  financier,  who  spoke  for 
Chicago  as  a  whole.  In  short,  the  movement  of 
the  wheat  means  a  matter  of  five  hundred  mil- 
lions to  American  bankers;  and  it  is  the  most 
important  occurrence  of  the  year  to  the  bankers 
of  Russia,  Canada,  Argentina,  and  Australia. 

[223] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

Many  a  bank,  as  well  as  many  a  railroad,  was 
founded  upon  the  moving  of  the  wheat. 

The  broker,  the  banker,  the  inspector,  and  the 
insurance  agent  —  these  four  render  a  useful 
service  to  the  wheat  that  has  left  home;  but 
there  is  a.fifth  man  about  whose  usefulness  there 
is  the  widest  possible  difference  of  opinion  — 
the  speculator.  From  one  point  of  view,  the 
speculator  is  the  driving-wheel  of  the  whole 
wheat  trade.  By  his  energy  and  his  impetus 
he  steadies  and  equalizes  the  conflicting  forces, 
and  gives  the  entire  mechanism  a  continuous 
movement.  From  another  point  of  view,  he  is 
a  gambler,  reckless  and  parasitical,  who  inter- 
feres with  the  natural  laws  of  supply  and  de- 
mand, and  snatches  an  unearned  toll  from  the 
wheat  bins  of  the  world. 

Some  of  the  wheat  nations  not  only  permit 
speculation  in  wheat,  but  practically  encourage 
it  by  allowing  more  privileges  to  the  speculator 
than  to  the  ordinary  business  man.  Others  are 
resolutely  stamping  it  out,  as  a  nuisance  and  a 
crime.  The  nations  that  have  voted  "Yea"  on 
speculation  are  Great  Britain,  Hungary,  Sweden, 

[224] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

Norway,  France,  and  the  United  States;  and 
the  nations  that  have  voted  "Nay''  are  Ger- 
many, Holland,  Belgium,  Australia,  Switzer- 
land, Greece,  and  Argentina.  Canada  has  been 
divided  on  the  question,  since  the  Province 
of  Manitoba  broke  up  the  Winnipeg  Grain 
Exchange  by  legislation  in  1908. 

In  the  end,  as  organization  increases,  specula- 
tion will  decline.  Chicago  will  try  to  push 
prices  up  and  London  will  try  to  pull  them 
down;  but  there  will  be  fewer  violent  fluctua- 
tions. Better  methods  of  farming  and  a  more 
reliable  system  of  news-gathering  will  eliminate 
the  element  of  chance  to  such  an  extent  that  the 
wheat  trade  will  offer  less  and  less  scope  for 
speculation  and  no  inducements  at  all  to  the 
reckless  plunger.  Already  the  frantic  methods 
of  marketing  wheat  have  been  outgrown  in 
the  Exchanges  of  Liverpool  and  London.  In 
neither  of  these  places  is  there  any  Wheat  Pit, 
or  any  maelstrom  of  frenzied  brokers.  Without 
any  shouting  or  jostling  or  wild  tumult  of  any 
kind,  the  English  brokers  are  buying  two  hun- 
dred million  bushels  of  wheat  a  year,  and  con- 

[225] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

trolling  the  situation  to  a  greater  extent  than 
any  other  body  of  men.  This,  too,  without  any 
restrictive  legislation. 

Before  wheat  was  made  plentiful  by  the 
Reaper,  it  was  possible  for  a  daring  man  to 
establish  a  corner  or  monopoly;  but  no  one  has 
succeeded  in  doing  this  for  more  than  forty  years. 
The  last  wheat  corner  that  did  not  fail  was  in 
1867.  Since  then  every  would-be  cornerer  has 
been  caught  in  his  own  trap.  The  wheat- 
machinery  of  the  world  has  now  become  so  vast 
that  no  individual  can  master  it.  Whoever  has 
tried  it  has  found  that  he  was  being  cornered 
by  the  wheat;  for  as  soon  as  he  had  raised  the 
price  to  an  artificial  level,  the  grain  has  flowed 
in  upon  him  and  covered  him  up.  The  price 
of  wheat  to-day  may  be  temporarily  deflected 
by  schemes  and  conspiracies,  but  not  for  long. 
Ultimately  it  is  decided  by  the  state  of  the  crop 
and  the  state  of  public  opinion  in  the  thirty-six 
countries  that  grow  wheat  and  eat  bread. 

Within  the  last  thirty  years,  since  the  Reaper 
has  come  into  universal  use,  the  area  of  the 
world's  wheat-field  has  doubled.  New  coun- 

[226] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

tries  have  arisen,  that  were  only  waste  places 
before.  The  habitable  earth  has  grown  im- 
mensely larger.  There  is  more  room  for  both 
wheat  and  men  to  grow,  and  less  scope  for  the 
forestaller  and  the  monopolist.  Just  as  the 
Reaper  was  the  advance-machine  of  civiliza- 
tion across  the  prairies  of  the  West,  so  it  is 
to-day  opening  up  new  territories  and  develop- 
ing new  resources. 

Northwestern  Canada,  for  instance,  was  a 
dozen  years  ago  supposed  to  be  a  barren  wilder- 
ness of  snow  and  ice,  in  which  none  but  the 
hunter  and  the  fur-trader  might  earn  a  living. 
Then  several  adventurous  Minnesotans  went 
across  and  planted  wheat.  It  grew  —  forty 
bushels  to  the  acre,  and  the  acres,  there  were 
two  hundred  million  of  them,  were  waiting  for 
the  plow  and  almost  to  be  had  for  the  asking. 
Since  then,  more  than  three  hundred  thousand 
American  farmers  have  swept  across  the  line 
and  joined  in  the  greatest  wheat-rush  of  this 
generation.  Twelve  hundred  grain  elevators 
have  been  built  along  the  line  of  the  Canadian 
Pacific ;  and  Chicago  self-binders  rattled  through 

[227] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

the  yellow  wheat  last  Summer  two  thousand 
miles  north  of  St.  Louis. 

In  Argentina,  too,  and  Australia,  where  the 
wheat  ripens  just  in  time  to  decorate  the  Christ- 
mas trees,  there  is  to  be  seen  the  same  conquest 
of  nature.  Desolate  plains  are  being  tamed  by 
the  plow  and  exploited  by  the  harvesters.  In 
the  semi-arid  belt  that  lies  east  of  the  Rocky 
Mountains,  new  kinds  of  wheat,  less  thirsty,  are 
being  taught  to  grow.  In  Russia  and  Siberia 
a  vast  tract  of  twenty-five  million  acres  has 
been  rescued  from  idleness  in  the  last  fifteen 
years.  And  even  in  the  valley  of  the  Euphrates, 
where  wheat,  so  it  is  believed,  was  born,  a  new 
railway  is  now  being  constructed  which,  when 
it  is  finished,  will  carry  oil  and  wheat. 

By  thus  opening  up  new  regions  to  settlement, 
the  wheat-farmer  not  only  thwarts  the  monopo- 
list and  makes  the  world  a  larger  place  to  live  in, 
he  does  more:  he  compels  the  gold  to  come 
out  of  its  vaults  in  the  great  cities  and  to  flow 
to  the  outermost  parts  of  the  earth.  For  every 
eighteen  thousand  pounds  of  wheat  that  go  to 
the  city,  there  will  go  back  to  the  farmer  one 

[228] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

pound  of  gold.  For  every  loaf  of  bread  upon  a 
Londoner's  table,  there  will  go  a  cent  and  a  half 
to  the  man  behind  the  Reaper.  And  so,  the 
sale  of  every  wheat-crop  means  that  the  gold 
will  come  throbbing  out  into  the  arteries  of 
business,  like  the  blood  from  the  heart,  and  on 
its  way  back  and  forth  nourish  the  whole  body 
of  the  nation. 

It  is  in  the  very  nature  of  the  wheat  trade  to 
benefit  the  masses  and  not  the  few.  The  more 
wheat  that  grows,  the  less  danger  there  is  of  an 
aristocracy  of  wheat.  More  wheat  means  more 
luxury  in  the  farmhouse,  more  traffic  on  the 
railway,  and  more  food  in  the  slums.  It 
means  busier  factories  and  steel-mills,  because 
the  farmer,  when  he  receives  his  wheat-money, 
becomes  the  customer  of  the  manufacturer. 
Thus  it  was  not  at  all  accidental  that  the  wealth 
of  Buenos  Ayres  came  with  the  exportation  of 
wheat,  or  that  the  commercial  awakening  of 
Canada  followed  the  opening  up  of  her  western 
prairies,  or  that  the  industrial  supremacy  of  the 
United  States  dates  from  the  immense  wheat 
harvests  that  began  in  1880  to  push  the  whole 

[229] 


CYRUS      HALL       M  c    C    O    R    M    I    C    K 

country  forward  with  the  power  of  $500,000- 
000  a  year.  As  one  of  McCormick's  competi- 
tors, J.  D.  Easter  of  Evanston,  once  declared, 
"It  seems  as  though  the  McCormick  Reaper 
started  the  ball  of  prosperity  rolling,  and  it  has 
been  rolling  ever  since." 

If  we  wish  to  know  what  the  Reaper  will 
eventually  do  for  these  new  wheat  countries, 
we  have  but  to  glance  back  over  the  short  his- 
tory of  our  ten  prairie  States.  Here,  by  the 
use  of  both  science  and  machinery,  the  New 
Farmer  has  reached  his  highest  level  of  success. 
By  1884  these  ten  States  had  twenty  million 
thriving  settlers,  riding  on  forty-two  thousand 
miles  of  railway,  raising  as  much  wheat  in  a  day 
as  New  England  could  in  a  year,  and  storing 
their  profits  in  twenty-five  hundred  banks.  In- 
credible as  it  may  seem  to  Europe  and  Asia,  it 
is  true  that  even  the  poorhouses  in  Iowa  and 
Kansas  were  used  last  year  as  storehouses  for 
wheat.  And  it  is  true  that  in  the  co-operative 
commonwealth  called  Kansas,  at  the  last 
assessment,  there  were  found  to  be  forty-four 
thousand  pianos  and  six  million  dollars'  worth 

[230] 


HIS          LIFE         AND         WORK 

of  carriages  and  automobiles.  This  in  a  State 
where  there  are  no  Grand  Dukes  and  where 
every  man  works  for  a  living! 

If  the  lords  of  Siberia  wish  to  know  what  may 
be  done  with  that  famine-swept  vastitude 
they  may  come  and  see  that  bed  of  an 
ancient  sea,  which  in  thirty  years  has  been  trans- 
formed into  the  world's  greatest  bread-land 
—  the  Red  River  Valley.  Here  the  banks  are 
not  only  packed  with  millions,  but  hundreds 
of  millions,  belonging  to  the  shirt-sleeved  pro- 
prietors of  the  soil.  Here,  in  the  yellow  days 
of  August,  a  man  may  travel  for  days  and  see 
no  limit  to  the  ocean  of  wraving,  shimmering 
wheat,  that  ripples  around  him  in  a  vast 
sky-bounded  circle.  Wheat  —  wheat  —  wheat! 
Nothing  but  wheat!  It  is  a  Field  of  the  Cloth 
of  Gold,  that  adds  nothing  to  the  glory  of  kings, 
but  much  to  the  glory  of  the  common  people. 
Drop  the  German  Empire  down  upon  this 
valley  and  its  expanse  of  dizzying,  swirling 
wheat,  and  the  wheat  would  not  be  wholly 
eclipsed.  There  would  still  be  enough  grain 
around  the  edges  to  make  a  golden  fringe. 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

The  children  born  and  bred  in  this  Red  River 
Valley  have  never  seen,  except  in  pictures,  a 
sickle  or  a  flail.  Their  only  conception  of  a 
harvest  time  is  that  a  battery  of  red  self-binders, 
with  reels  whirling  and  knives  clacking,  shall 
charge  upon  the  wheat  as  though  each  acre 
were  a  battalion  of  hostile  infantry,  and  make 
war  until  the  land  is  strewn  with  heaps  of  fallen 
sheaves.  Famine,  to  these  children  of  the 
wheat,  seems  as  remote  a  danger  as  the  cooling 
of  the  sun.  Even  the  one  young  State  of  North 
Dakota,  not  yet  of  age,  is  now  growing  food 
for  herself,  and  for  twelve  million  people  besides. 

So,  the  urgent  world-problem  is  to  teach 
other  nations  the  lesson  of  the  Red  River  Val- 
ley. There  is  not  yet  enough  bread  so  that 
we  may  put  a  loaf  at  every  plate.  To  feed  the 
whole  race  according  to  the  present  American 
standard  of  living  would  require  ten  thousand 
million  bushels  —  three  times  as  much  as  we 
are  raising  now;  and  the  demand  is  fast 
outgrowing  the  supply.  Sooner  or  later  the 
Chinese  will  learn  to  eat  at  least  one  loaf  a 
week  apiece,  and  when  they  do,  it  will  mean 

[232] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

that  the  world's  wheat  crop  must  be  increased 
ten  per  cent. 

More  wheat  and  a  more  efficient  organiza- 
tion of  wheat  agencies  —  that  is  the  programme 
of  the  future.  Already  one  unsuccessful  effort 
has  been  made  to  hold  an  international  Wheat 
Congress;  and  the  second  attempt  may  end 
more  happily.  Now  that  the  world  has  be- 
come so  small  that  a  cablegram  flashes  com- 
pletely around  it  in  twelve  minutes;  now  that 
there  are  forty-four  nations  united  by  The 
Hague  Conferences  and  fifty-eight  by  the  Postal 
Union;  now  that  war  has  grown  to  be  so 
expensive  that  one  cannon-shot  costs  as  much 
as  a  college  education  and  one  battleship  as 
much  as  a  first-class  University, —  it  is  quite 
probable  that  the  march  of  co-operation  will 
continue  until  there  is  a  Congress,  and  a  cen- 
tral headquarters  and  a  Tribunal,  which  will 
represent  nothing  less  than  an  international 
fellowship  of  the  wheat. 


[233] 


CHAPTER  XIII 

GIVE    US   THIS    DAY    OUR    DAILY    BREAD 

T  \  7E  have  now  seen  the  machinery  by  which 
the  wheat  is  cut,  moved,  stored,  financed, 
and  marketed.  Its  next  and  last  step,  as  wheat, 
is  to  the  Flour-mill,  whence  it  goes  to  the 
bakeries,  the  groceries,  and  the  homes  of  six 
hundred  million  people.  Here,  too,  there  have 
had  to  come  new  methods  since  the  advent  of 
the  Reaper. 

In  the  Dark  Ages  of  the  sickle  and  the  flail, 
two  flat  stones  did  well  enough  for  a  flour-mill. 
Even  the  bread  that  was  found  in  the  ruins  of 
Pompeii  had  been  made  of  wheat  that  was  merely 
crushed.  Later  came  the  mill  run  by  horse- 
power or  by  the  energy  of  a  little  stream.  Such 
were  the  first  American  mills.  The  mill  that 
was  operated  by  George  Washington  at  Mount 
Vernon,  for  instance,  was  run  by  water-power 
and  produced  flour  that  sold  for  thirteen  dollars 
a  barrel.  Rochester,  N.  Y.,  was  the  first  Amer- 
ican "Flour  City";  but  the  modern  flour-mill 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

did  not  come  until  it  was  compelled  to  come  by 
the  deluge  of  Reaper  wheat  that  flooded  the 
markets  in  1870. 

As  usually  happens  in  the  case  of  inventions, 
it  came  where  it  was  not  expected.  It  made  its 
arrival  in  the  Hungarian  city  of  Budapest  in 
1874.  The  "new  process,"  as  it  was  called,  was 
based  upon  the  use  of  steel  rolls  instead  of  stones. 
It  was  as  superior  to  the  old-fashioned  way  as 
the  Reaper  had  been  to  the  sickle  or  as  the 
thresher  was  to  the  flail.  It  was  amazingly  quick 
and  produced  a  better  flour.  By  reason  of 
these  new  mills,  Budapest  became  at  a  bound 
the  foremost  "Flour  City"  of  the  world,  and 
held  its  place  against  all  comers  until  1890. 

Then  the  prestige  passed  to  Minneapolis  — 
a  young  city  on  the  head-waters  of  the  Missis- 
sippi, the  recent  home  of  the  prairie-dog  and 
the  buffalo.  Shortly  before  the  Civil  War,  a 
youthful  lawyer  named  William  D.  Washburn 
drifted  westwards  from  Maine  until  he  came  to 
Minneapolis,  at  that  time  a  tiny  village  on  the 
frontier.  He  found  no  clients  here,  and  no  law; 
but  he  did  find  a  ledge  of  limestone  rock  jutting 

[  235  ] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

across  the  Mississippi  and  making  the  only 
large  water-fall  in  all  that  region.  So  he  threw 
aside  his  legal  education  and  became  the  organi- 
zer of  a  water-power  company  and  the  owner  of 
a  little  flour-mill.  Soon  the  long  line  of  Reapers 
reached  Minneapolis  and  swept  on  westwards 
into  the  richest  wheat  lands  that  had  ever  been 
known.  The  wheat  overwhelmed  the  slow  old- 
fashioned  mills,  so  the  ex-lawyer  in  1878  adopted 
the  Budapest  system  and  built  a  roller-mill  that 
was  the  quickest  and  most  automatic  of  its 
kind.  Other  millers  had  by  this  time  come  to 
Minneapolis  —  Pillsbury,  Crosby,  Christian, 
and  Dunwoody;  and  all  together  they  pushed 
the  flour  business  until  in  twelve  years  they  had 
become  the  main  millers  of  the  world. 

To-day  the  river  of  wheat  is  deepest  at  Minne- 
apolis. Its  twenty-two  great  mills  roll  120,- 
000,000  bushels  into  flour  as  an  ordinary  year's 
work.  While  the  swiftest  mill  in  Athens,  in 
the  age  of  Pericles,  produced  no  more  than  two 
barrels  a  day,  there  is  one  mill  of  incredible  size 
in  Minneapolis  that  fills  seventeen  thousand 
barrels  in  a  twenty -four  hours'  run  —  enough 

[236] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

to  give  bread  to  New  York  State  and  California. 
What  the  Greeks  did  in  a  day  the  Minnesotans 
do  in  ten  seconds.  Five  million  barrels  of  this 
Minneapolis  flour  is  each  year  scattered  among 
foreign  nations,  a  fact  which  informs  us  that 
flour  is  now  not  a  local  product,  but  part  of  the 
real  currency  of  nations.  No  doubt  the  people 
who  dwell  by  the  Sea  of  Galilee,  whose  fathers 
were  once  miraculously  fed  upon  seven  loaves 
of  bread  and  a  few  fishes,  are  now  being  fed 
miraculously  upon  loaves  of  bread  made  from 
the  flour  of  Minneapolis. 

The  making  of  the  bread  —  that  is  the  final 
step  in  this  movement  of  the  wheat.  As  yet, 
this  is  a  local  process,  though  not  wholly  so. 
Certain  ready-to-eat  foods  are  now  being  made 
from  wheat  and  boxed  in  such  a  way  that  they 
may  be  sent  from  one  country  to  another.  If 
we  trace  back  the  original  of  a  loaf  of  bread  of 
ordinary  size,  we  shall  find  that  it  was  made 
from  two-thirds  of  a  pound  of  flour,  which  was 
rolled  from  one  pound  of  wheat,  containing 
about  twelve  thousand  grains  that  were  grown 
on  forty-eight  square  feet  of  land  and  reaped 

[  237 1 


CYRUS      HALL       McCORMICK 

by  a  self-binder  in  two  seconds.  When  the 
wheat  was  cut  in  the  old-fashioned  way,  with  a 
hand-sickle,  every  loaf  of  bread  required  eighty 
seconds'  labor  instead  of  two. 

In  a  public  test  made  last  year  in  the  State 
of  Washington,  wheat  was  cut,  threshed,  ground 
into  flour,  arid  baked  into  biscuits  in  twenty- 
three  minutes.  This  is  an  evidence  that  all  the 
machinery  for  handling  grain  has  now  been 
brought  up  to  the  same  high  level  of  speed  and 
efficiency  as  the  self-binder.  It  also  helps  us  to 
understand  the  daily  marvel  of  cheap  bread  — 
the  fact  that  a  hundred  loaves  of  bread  are  now 
delivered  one  by  one  at  an  American  working- 
man's  door  for  the  cost  of  a  seat  at  the  opera  or 
a  couple  of  song-records  by  Caruso. 

So  plentiful  is  this  bread  that  the  loaves  baked 
from  American  flour  in  1907  would  have  made 
a  wall  of  bread  around  the  earth,  or  have  given 
thirty  loaves  apiece  to  every  human  creature; 
and  so  cheap  has  it  become  in  these  latter  days 
that  even  in  the  United  States  it  is  not  more 
than  three  cents  a  day  per  capita.  The  un- 
skilled laborer  who  receives  $1.50  a  day,  earns 

[  238  ] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

his  bread  in  the  first  ten  minutes,  every  work  day 
morning.  And  the  total  tax  he  pays  to  the  men 
who  make  the  self-binders  is  not  more  than  one 
tenth  of  a  cent  per  loaf. 

Three-sevenths  of  the  people  of  the  world  are 
now  on  a  wheat  basis.  They  are  the  lesser 
fraction  in  point  of  numbers,  but  the  larger  in 
point  of  prosperity  and  progress.  A  wheat 
map  of  the  globe  would  be  very  nearly  a  map  of 
modern  civilization.  As  yet,  there  are  many 
peasants  who  gro\v  wheat  and  cannot  afford  to 
eat  it.  But  the  number  of  bread-eaters  is  stead- 
ily increasing,  probably  at  the  rate  of  four  or 
five  million  a  year. 

The  nation  that  eats  most  bread  per  capita 
is  Belgium.  After  her  come  France,  England, 
and  the  United  States.  As  the  Belgians,  with 
their  scanty  acres,  cannot  grow  more  wheat  than 
would  support  them  for  nine  weeks,  they  are 
compelled  to  import  nearly  fifty  million  bushels 
a  year;  and  it  is  this  continual  influx  of  grain 
that  has  done  most  to  make  Antwerp  the  third 
busiest  port  in  the  world  and  the  home  of  forty 
steamship  lines. 

[  239  ] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

France  is  second  as  an  eater,  and  third  as 
a  grower,  of  wheat.  But  it  is  not  an  important 
factor  in  the  international  market,  as  there  is 
usually  almost  an  even  balance  between  what 
it  grows  and  what  it  eats.  It  has  very  little 
either  to  buy  or  to  sell.  Its  crops  are  steady  and 
large,  and  by  intensive  cultivation  the  thrifty 
French  are  obtaining  the  same  amount  of  grain 
from  less  and  less  land. 

There  are  two  countries  only,  Great  Britain 
and  Holland,  that  impose  no  tariff  upon  either 
wheat  or  flour.  Neither  the  British  nor  the 
Dutch  will  tolerate  a  bread  tax.  Both  countries 
have  barely  enough  land  to  grow  one-quarter 
as  much  wheat  as  they  need,  although  there  was 
a  period  in  the  early  history  of  England  when 
it  was  nicknamed  "the  Granary  of  the  North," 
because  of  its  many  wheat-fields.  To-day  the 
bread  on  three  British  tables  out  of  four  is 
made  of  wheat  brought  in  a  British  ship  from 
some  foreign  country;  and  the  total  amount  of 
wheat  consumed  in  the  United  Kingdom  is  so 
great  that  it  requires  an  army  of  93,000  men 
with  self-binders  to  cut  it  and  tie  it  into  sheaves. 

[240] 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

If  it  had  to  be  reaped  with  sickles,  it  would  be  a 
ten-day  harvesting  for  half  the  able-bodied  men 
in  the  two  islands. 

Germany  eats  less  wheat  than  Great  Britain, 
and  raises  more  than  twice  as  much.  The  Ger- 
mans are  skilled  wheat-farmers.  They  grow 
as  much  on  half  an  acre  of  poor  soil  as  Americans 
grow  on  a  whole  acre  of  good  soil.  The  Italians 
eat  very  nearly  as  much  as  the  Germans,  and 
raise  a  larger  crop  by  dint  of  great  labor  on  the 
tiny  farms  and  terraced  hillsides  of  Italy.  Both 
countries  tax  the  bread  of  the  poor  by  a  tariff  of 
thirty-eight  to  forty-eight  cents  a  bushel  on 
foreign  wheat.  The  Austrians  and  Hungarians, 
in  spite  of  a  climate  of  extremes  and  sudden 
changes,  manage  to  supply  themselves  with  more 
than  ten  billion  loaves  of  bread  by  the  tillage  of 
their  own  fields,  and  usually  have  some  flour  to 
sell  to  the  neighboring  countries.  The  Spanish 
cannot  quite  feed  themselves;  in  addition  to  the 
wheat  they  grow,  they  are  obliged  to  buy  about 
a  hundred  ship-loads  a  year.  Denmark  comes 
out  even.  Portugal  buys  her  bread  for  four 
months  of  the  year.  Greece,  Norway,  and  Swe- 

[241] 


CYRUS      HALL       McCORMICK 

den  raise  half  enough  wheat.  The  Swiss  can 
get  no  more  from  their  valley-farms  than  will 
feed  them  for  ten  weeks.  And  the  peasants  of 
Russia  and  Roumania,  who  raise  wheat  in 
abundance,  have  unfortunately  not  yet  risen  to 
that  luxurious  level  of  life  in  which  white  bread 
is  the  e very-day  food  of  the  people.  Although 
Russia  has  more  w^heat  to  sell  than  any  other 
nation,  a  Russian  eats  one-third  as  much  wheat 
as  a  Belgian,  and  there  is  a  famine  somewhere 
in  the  vast  Russian  Empire  almost  every  winter. 
Africa  is  not  yet  a  wheat-eating  continent. 
Egypt,  which  was,  in  the  Golden  Age  of  the 
Pharaohs,  the  wheat-centre  of  the  world,  now 
grows  less  grain  than  Oregon;  Algeria  raises  less 
than  Ohio;  and  Tunis,  from  the  fields  that  sur- 
round the  ruins  of  ancient  Carthage,  produces 
less  grain  than  Tennessee.  India  is  slowly 
shifting  from  rice  to  wheat.  Many  of  the  fields 
that  once  grew  indigo  are  now  yellow  with 
grain.  At  present  India  is  the  most  uncertain 
factor  in  the  situation,  as  it  may  have  eighty 
million  bushels  to  sell  or  none.  As  it  is  one- 
third  as  large  as  the  United  States,  and  crowded 


HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

with  three  times  the  population,  there  is  always 
need  of  its  grain  at  home.  As  yet,  the  Reaper 
has  not  been  allowed  to  extend  its  benefits  to 
India.  Most  of  the  grain  is  reaped  in  the  old 
slow,  wasteful  way.  It  is  sown  by  hand,  cut  by 
sickles,  stored  in  pits,  and  transported  on  the 
backs  of  camels.  Little  Japan  is  falling  into 
line  as  a  bread-eating  country,  growing  now  as 
much  wheat  as  California.  And  even  China, 
which  is  not  as  a  whole  on  the  wheat-map 
of  the  world,  has  recently  begun  to  grow 
wheat  in  Manchuria  and  to  build  flour-mills 
at  Hong-Kong. 

So,  the  human  race  will  soon  be  able  to  feed 
itself.  It  has  learned  how  and  needs  only  to  use 
to  the  full  the  agencies  that  are  already  invented 
and  established.  Beginning  with  the  McCor- 
mick  Reaper  in  1831,  there  has  been  constructed 
a  world  mechanism  of  the  bread,  which  prom- 
ises to  wholly  abolish  Famine  and  its  brood  of 
evils.  The  crude  machine  that  was  hammered 
and  whittled  into  shape  in  a  log  workshop  on  a 
Virginian  farm,  has  now  become  a  System  —  a 
McCormick  System,  that  cuts  ten  million  bushels 

[243] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

of  ripe  wheat  a  day  and  transports  it  hither  and 
thither  as  handily  as  though  the  whole  round 
earth  were  girt  with  belt-conveyors. 

That  young  Virginian  farmer  who  awoke 
from  his  dream  and  made  his  dream  come  true, 
made  it  possible  for  a  few  in  each  country  to 
provide  enough  food  for  all.  He  found  a  cure 
for  Hunger,  which  had  always  persisted  like  a 
chronic  disease.  He  heaped  the  plates  on  the 
tables  of  thirty-six  nations.  He  took  a  drudgery 
and  transformed  it  into  a  profession.  He  in- 
structed the  wheat-eating  races  how  to  increase 
the  "seven  small  loaves"  so  that  the  multitudes 
should  be  fed.  He  picked  up  the  task  of  feeding 
the  hungry  masses  —  the  Christly  task  that  had 
lain  unfulfilled  for  eighteen  centuries,  and  led 
the  way  in  organizing  it  into  a  system  of  inter- 
national reciprocity. 

To-day  there  is  no  longer  in  most  countries 
any  tragic  note  in  the  Epic  of  the  Wheat.  There 
is  no  sweating  peasant  with  a  hoe.  The  plow- 
man may  even  sit,  it  he  wishes,  upon  the  sliding 
steel  knife  that  slices  the  soil  into  furrows,  or 
upon  the  steel  harrow  that  combs  the  clods  into 

[244] 


\ 

HIS         LIFE         AND         WORK 

soft,  loose  earth.  The  sower  is  no  heavy-footed 
serf,  scattering  his  grain  in  handfuls  upon  the 
surface  of  the  soil,  where  the  birds  of  the  air  may 
devour  it.  He,  too,  rides  upon  a  machine  with 
steel  fingers  that  plant  the  living  seed  securely 
in  the  living  earth.  And  when,  at  the  call  of  the 
sun  and  the  rain,  the  black  field  becomes  green 
and  ripens  from  green  to  gold,  its  yellow  fruitage 
is  swept  down  and  into  barns,  not  by  a  horde  of 
stooping  laborers,  but  by  the  Grand  March  of 
the  Harvesters,  the  drivers  of  painted  chariots, 
who  ride  against  the  grain  and  leave  it  behind 
them  in  bound  sheaves. 

Henceforth  civilization  may  be  based  upon 
higher  motives  than  the  Search  for  Food.  The 
struggle  for  existence  may  become  the  struggle 
of  the  nobler  nature  for  its  full  development. 
The  gentle  need  not  be  eliminated  by  the  strong. 
Instead  of  contending  with  one  another  in  an 
unbrotherly  competition,  men  may  move  up- 
ward to  the  higher  activities  of  social  self-preser- 
vation and  organized  self-help.  By  mastering 
the  problem  of  the  bread,  they  have  opened  up 
such  opportunities  for  education,  for  travel,  for 

[245] 


CYRUS      HALL      McCORMICK 

happier  homes,  for  the  prosperity  and  friendship 
of  the  nations,  as  no  previous  generation  has 
ever  had.  And  it  is  here,  it  is  in  this  larger  and 
kindlier  civilization,  that  is  now  made  possible 
by  the  Reaper  and  the  wheat-mechanism  which 
has  grown  up  around  it,  that  we  shall  find  the 
full  spiritual  value  to  the  world  of  that  stout- 
hearted bread-winner  of  the  human  race  whose 
life  began  among  the  hills  of  Old  Virginia  one 
hundred  years  ago. 


THE  END 


[246] 


INDEX 


INDEX 


Adams,  John,  15 

Adriance,  John  P.,   103,  119 

Advertisements  of  Reaper,  54, 
81-83,  112,  134 

Africa  not  a  wheat-eating 
country,  242 

Agencies  established  for  sale  of 
Reapers  (about  1844),  63 

Agents,  Cyrus  H.  McCor- 
mick's  plan  in  regard  to,  83, 
84,86 

Agriculture,  Department  of,  87 

Albert,  Prince,  125,  132 

Algeria,  242 

Allen,  Grant,  205 

America,  yacht,  131 

Amsterdam,  222 

Antwerp,  no  grain  stored  in, 
217;  Bourse  in,  222;  third 
busiest  port  in  world,  239 

Appleby,  John  F.,  115 

Argentina,  209,  212,  225,  228 

Arkwright,  inventor,  53,   131 

Armagh  massacre  of  1641,  22 

Athens,  mills  at,  236 

Atkins,  Jearum,  106 

Augusta  County,  Virginia,  3 

Australia,  wheat  crop  of,  209; 
legislation  against  specula- 
tion in,  225;  development 
of,  228 


Australian  stripper,  200 

Austria  in  1809,  4;  farm  labor- 
ers received  no  wages  in, 
123;  climate  and  wheat  pro- 
duction in,  241 

Austrian  Emperor  decorated 
Cyrus  H.  McCormick,  135 

Ayrshire,  Scotland,  86 


Babylon,  206 

Baggage  Case,  1862-1885,  100 

-102;   see  also  Pennsylvania 

Railroad 

Baltic  Exchange,  London,  221 
Baltic,  holder  of  ocean  record, 

131 
Baltimore  and  Ohio  Railway, 

49 
Baltimore  Convention  of  1861, 

158,  166 
Bankers  concerned  in  moving 

of  wheat,  223,  224 
Barbary  pirates,  4 
Barclay,  Col.  A.  T.,  40 
Barge,  invention  of,  210 
Battleship  turret,  improver  of, 

95 
Bavarians  in  the  Tyrol  (1809), 

4 
Beagle,   H.   M.   S.,   Darwin's 

voyage  in,  51 


249] 


INDEX 


Bear,  Henry,  66 

Behel,  Jacob,  115 

Belgian  method  of  reaping,  6 

Belgians,  King  of  the,  125 

Belgium,  legislation  against 
speculation  in,  225;  con- 
sumption of  bread  per  capita 
in,  239,  242 

Berlin,  214,  217 

Berthelot,  51 

Bessemer  converter,  17,  49,  69, 
210 

Bismarck,  136 

Black  Death  in  England,  124 

Blackie,  1 

Blaine,  Mrs.  Emmons,  183 

Blanchard,  inventor,  95 

Blue  Ridge  Mountains,  2,  36 

Board  of  Trade,  none  in  Chi- 
cago when  Cyrus  H.  Mc- 
Cormick  came,  70 

Bonanza  farms,  194 

Bull,  Ole,  184 

Bonar,  1 

Bonner,  Henry,  publisher,  21 

Bottgher,  53 

Bourses,  or  European  Ex- 
changes, 222 

Bowyer,  Col.  John,  40 

Braila,  Roumania,  216 

Bradshaw,  Prof.,  40 

Brains,  John,  59 

Bread,  making  of,  237,  238; 
record  time  from  standing 
grain  to,  238;  cheapness  of, 
238 


Bread  tax,  240,  241 

Brokers,  wheat,  219,  222.  224 

Brooks,  Absalom,  58 

Brown,  A.  C.,  66 

Brown,  Senator,  of  Miss.,  93 

Bryant,  76 

Buckle,  204 

Budapest,  Bourse  in,  222; 
"new  process"  mills  in,  235, 
236 

Buenos  Ayres,  218,  222,  229 

Buffalo,  N.  Y.,  69,  216 

Bulwer,  Sir  Henry  Lytton, 
130 

Burson,  W.  W.,  115 

Bushnell,  Reaper  manufac- 
turer, 103,  120 

Butler,  E.  K.,  143,  148 

Butler,  Gen.,  36 


Cablegrams,  233 
Calhoun,  164,  178 
California,  51,  82,  190,  243 
Calvin,  John,  156,  157,  168 
Canada,   grain   inspectors  in, 

222;    grain   speculation   in, 

225 
Canada  (western),  wheat  crop 

of,  209;    railways  of,   212, 

213;    development  of,  227, 

229 

Canadian  Pacific  Railway,  227 
Canal,  first,  in  Chicago,  75 
Carlyle,  155 
Carnegie,  Andrew,  56 


[250] 


INDEX 


Carpenter,  "Pump,"  114,  115, 
117 

Carson,  Miss  Polly,  40,  41 

Carthage,  ruins  of,  242 

Cash,  John,  35 

Cavaliers  of  Virginia,  20 

Chalons,  Emperor  Napoleon's 
estate,  134 

Chautauqua  idea,  originator  of, 
120 

Chicago,  4,  30,  31,  37,  50,  67, 
68,  70-78,  83,  85,  97,  106, 
137,  144,  146,  151-153,  162, 
166,  188,  189,  192,  196,  201, 
214,  215,  218,  219,  222,  223 

Chicago  fire  of  1871,  30,  151- 
153,  182 

China,  opium  traffic  of,  204; 
future  use  of  wheat  in,  232, 
243 

Chopin,  1,  51 

Christian,  Minneapolis  miller, 
236 

Cincinnati  Democratic  Con. 
vention,  171 

Circus,  first,  in  Chicago,  71 

City  and  town  dwellers,  pro- 
portion of,  195,  196 

Civil  War,  see  Secession,  War 
of 

Clay,  Henry,  15,  164 

Clermont,  Fulton's  steamboat, 
7 

Cleveland,  Ohio,  73 

Collins  Line,  131 

Colt's  pistol,  130,  131 


Columbus,  Reaper  traced  back 
to,  17 

Congress,  first  recognition  of 
Chicago  by,  72;  Lincoln 
elected  to,  72;  patent  suits 
carried  to,  91,  92;  how 
inventors  have  been  treated 
by,  95 

Cooper,  Peter,  11,  155 

Corn  stored  at  Chicago,  215 

Corn  Trade  Association,  Lon- 
don, 221 

Corn  Trade  News,  of  Liver- 
pool, 221 

Corners  in  wheat,  226 

Cort,  53 

Cotton-gin,  52,  97,  191 

Covenanters,  Scotch,  19,  23, 
157 

Cradle,  5,  27,  45 

Crichton-Browne,  Sir  James, 
204 

Crimean  War,  190 

Criminals  in  period  of  1809,  8 

Cromwell,  173,  185 

Crosby,  Minneapolis  miller, 
236 

Cross  of  the  Legion  of  Honor 
given  Cyrus  H.  McCormick 
by  Emperor  Napoleon  III, 
135 

Crystal  Palace,  London,  127 

D 

Dalrymple,   Oliver,    193,    194 
Darwin,  1,  51 


251 


INDEX 


Davis,  H.  Winter,  99 

Davy,  131 

Debates  between  Lincoln  and 
Douglas,  100 

Deere,  John,  49,  131 

Deering,  William,  115,  116, 
118,  121,  150 

De  Lesseps,  70 

Denmark,  241 

Department  store,  free  trial 
given  by,  80 

Des  Moines,  Iowa,  6,  86 

Dickerson,  E.  N.,  91,  98 

Diet  of  Worms,  156 

Diseases  prevalent  in  1809,  7 

Divider,  origin  of,  32,  46 

Douglas,  Stephen  A.,  91,  99, 
100 

Driving-wheel  of  Reaper,  34 

Drunkenness  in  1809,  7 

Duluth-Superior,  215 

Dunfermline,  Scotland,  An- 
drew Carnegie's  birthplace, 
56 

Dunwoody,  Minneapolis  mil- 
ler, 236 

Duties  imposed  on  American 
machines  entering  Europe, 
136 

E 

Eager,  Samuel,  58 
Easter,  J.  D.,  230 
Eastern     States,    labor     and 
money  in  (about  1839),  58 
Ebrington,  Lord,  127, 128 


Edward,  King,  132 
Egypt    once    wheat-centre    of 
world    and    present    pro- 
duction  in,   242 
Egyptian  tombs,  wheat  found 

in,   206 
"  1800  -  and  -  starve  -  to  -  death  " 

period,  51 
Elastic  currency,  demands  for, 

223 

Electric  engine,  builder  of,  95 
Electrical  experiments,  50 
Elevators,  grain,  214-217 
Embargo  (1809),  8-10 
Emerson,  Ralph,  45,  46,  98, 

103, 119 

Emerson,  Ralph  Waldo,  97 
England,  riots  in  (1809),  3,  4; 
U.  S.  flag  flouted  by,  4;    at 
war  with  Scotland,  18,  19; 
with    Ireland,  19;     Scotch- 
Irish  ready   for  war    with, 
20;     conditions  in    (1831), 
50;  price  of  labor  in,  123; 
labor  conditions   and  farm 
machinery    in,    124;     Corn 
Exchange  in,  218;   specula- 
tion  in,  224;    consumption 
of  bread  in,  239;    no  tariff 
on  wheat  or  flour  in,  240; 
has  lost  place  as  "  granary 
of    the   North,"  240;    con- 
trasted with  Germany,  241 
Erie  Canal,  210,  212 
Ether,  use  of,  69 
Euphrates,  valley  of,  228 


252] 


INDEX 


Europe,  introduction  of  Reap- 
er into,  and  trade  with,  123- 
138;  cost  of  growing  wheat 
in,  209;  American  wheat 
exported  to,  210;  wheat 
stored  in,  217 

Exchanges,  grain,  218-222 


Factories  in  1831,  48, 49 
Factory,  rebuilding  of,  after 
fire,  31,  152,  182;  present 
size  of,  47,  196-200;  in  Vir- 
ginia, poor  transportation 
from,  64;  McCormick's 
plan  to  build  his  own,  67; 
Chicago  chosen  as  site  of, 
77,  137,  202;  largest  in 
Chicago,  77;  in  1860,  106; 
output  of,  137;  at  time  of 
Chicago  fire,  151;  in  1884, 
188 

Famine  of  1846  in  Ireland,  71 
Famines,  local,  51;  in  Russia, 

242 
Farm  laborers  drawn  by  1849 

gold  rush,  82,83,190 
Farm  machinery,  none  in  1809, 
5,  11;  invention  of,  17; 
profession  of  making,  22; 
none  in  1831,  49;  farm- 
ers not  using  (about  1839), 
57,  58;  fixed  prices  for,  81; 
field  test  as  method  of  mar- 
keting, 87;  McCormick's 
system  of  selling,  89;  intro- 


duction of,  in  England,  124; 
sale  of,  boomed  after  1849, 
190;  present  era  of,  193-195 

Farmers,  increase  of  (1810— 
1820),  11,  21;  their  opin- 
ions of  early  types  of  mow- 
ers and  reapers,  43;  Mc- 
Cormick  's  confidence  in, 
80;  advertising  among,  and 
testimonials  from,  82;  Mc- 
Cormick  stood  well  with, 
85;  his  business  methods 
with,  85;  McCormick  hurt 
by  petitions  of  protest  from, 
94;  credit  extended  to,  193; 
farm  machinery  used  by, 
193-195 

" Farmer's  Register, "  43 

Fassler,  Jerome,  119 

Federal  bankrupt  law  of  1842, 
71 

Field,  Cyrus  W.,  155 

Field  tests,  87-89, 134, 135 

Fingers  on  cutting  blade,  ori- 
gin of,  33 

Fire  department,  Chicago, 
1846,  72 

Fiske,  John,  21 

Fitch  &Co.,  66 

FitzGerald,  1 

Fixed  price,  Reapers  sold  at, 
80,  81 

Flesh  food,  205 

"Flour  Cities, "234,  235 

Flour,  manufacture  of,  234- 
237 


[253] 


INDEX 


Flour-mills,    234-237 

Food,  first  necessity,  203,  204; 
relation  between  popula- 
tion and,  204;  three  prin- 
cipal articles  of,  205 

Foreign  trade  in  Reapers,  123, 
124,  131-138 

Fowler,  Miss  Nettie,  see  Mc- 
Cormick,  Mrs  Cyrus  H. 

France,  U.  S.  flag  flouted  by, 
4;  price  of  labor  in,  123;  no 
central  wheat  market  in, 
222;  speculation  in,  225; 
consumption  of  bread  in, 
239,  240;  wheat  grown  in, 
240;  intensive  cultivation  in, 
240 

Frederick  of  Holstein,  Prince, 
128 

Frederick,  Virginia,  3 

Fredericksruhe,    Bismarck 's 
estate,  136 

Free  library,  none  in  1831,  50 

Free  trial  of  Reaper,  80 

French  Academy  of  Science 
elected  Cyrus  H.  McCor- 
mick  a  member,  136 

French  Revolution,  156,  204 

Froude,  21 

Fulton,  Robert,  7,  11,  21,  53, 
95 

Fulton's  steamboat,  7 


Galatz,  216 
Galena,  111.,  76 


Galilee,  Sea  of,  people  who 
dwell  by  the,  237 

Gammon,  E.  H.,  116 

Garrison,  William  Lloyd,  51 

Gas  not  used  in  Chicago  when 
Cyrus  H.  McCormick  came, 
70 

Genoa,  218 

Gerland,  Dr.,  206 

Germany  in  1809,  4;  price  of 
labor  in,  123;  reasons  why 
Reapers  are  not  made  in,  136 ; 
grain  inspectors  in,  222; 
legislation  against  specu- 
lation in,  225;  compared 
with  Red  River  Valley,  231 ; 
compared  with  Great  Brit- 
ain, 240;  intensive  cultiva- 
tion in,  241 

Gilkerson,  David,  58 

Gladstone,  2,  51 

Glanders,  a  contagious  dis- 
ease, 5 

Glessner,  Reaper  manufac- 
turer, 103,  120 

Gold  put  in  circulation  by 
wheat,  228,  229 

Gold  rush  to  California,  1849, 
82,  190 

Goodyear,  53,  95 

Gorham,  Marquis  L.,  115,  117 

Grain-car,  invention  and  use 
of,  211,  212 

Granville,  Lord,  131 

Gray  &  Warner,  66 

Great  Britain,  see  England 


[254] 


INDEX 


Greece,  225,  241 

Greeley,  Horace,  72,  129,  155, 

167 
Gutenberg,  53 

H 

Hague,  The,  Conferences,  233 

Hall,  Dr.  John,  169 

Hall,  Patrick,  22,  23 

Hamburg,  222 

Hancock,  candidate  for  Presi- 
dent, 171 

Hand-labor,  Reaper  invented 
in  era  of,  48,  49 

"Hard  Times"  measures  in 
Legislature,  71 

Harding,  George,  91,  99 

Hargreaves,  inventor  of  weav- 
ing machinery,  53 

Harper,  Henry,  publisher,  21 

Hart,  Eli,  &  Co.,  52 

Harvest  season  only  opportu- 
nity of  testing  Reaper,  61, 
92 

Haussemann,  Baron,  1 

Hayes,  President,  165 

Hayes-Tilden  controversy,  165 

Heathcoat,  inventor  of  weav- 
ing machinery,  53 

Henry,  Joseph,  21,50 

Herald  Square,  New  York,  6 

Hewitt,  Abram  S.,  155 

Kite,  James  M.,  63 

Hitt,  Dr.  N.  M.,  37 

Hobbs  lock,  131 

Hoe  press,    49,  69,  131 


Holland  in  1809,  4;  legisla- 
tion against  speculation  in, 
225;  no  tariff  on  wheat  or 
flour  in,  240 

Holloway,  D.  P.,  96 

Holmes,  1,  51 

Holmes,  H.  A.,  115 

Homestead  Act  of  1862,  193 

Hong-Kong,  flour-mills  at, 
243 

Houghawout,  John  W.,  40 

Houghton,  Lord,  1 

Howe,  69,  95,  131 

Hudson  Bay,  213 

Hulled  corn,  use  of,  69 

Hungary,  speculation  in ,  224 ; 
climate  and  wheat  produc- 
tion of,  241 

Hunger,  evils  due  to,  204,  205 

Huntley,  Byron  E.,  103,  119 

Hussey,  Obed,  87, 88, 119 

Huxley,  51 

Hyatt,  inventor,  95 


Illinois,  64,  65,  69,  100,  151, 
193 

Immigrants  supplied  with 
Reapers  on  credit,  85,  86 

India,  opium  traffic  of,  204; 
cost  of  wheat  production 
and  labor  in,  209,  242;  rail- 
ways of,  212;  area  and 
population  of,  242,  243; 
wasteful  methods  practised 
in,  243 


[  255  ] 


INDEX 


Indian  Confederacy  of  Tecum- 
seh,  4 

Indian  Massacre  (1764)  in 
Rockbridge  County,  Vir- 
ginia, 2 

Indiana  wheat  crop,  217 

Indigo  displaced  by  wheat  in 
India,  242 

Inspectors  of  grain,  222,  224 

Insurance  agents  for  wheat, 
222-224 

Intensive  cultivation,  240, 
241 

Interior,   The,   162,   163,   172 

International  Harvester  Com- 
pany, 183,  201 

Inventors  not  encouraged,  6; 
how  treated  by  Congress  and 
the  Patent  Office,  95;  rights 
of,  as  stated  by  Webster, 
95 

Iowa,  50,  63,  69,  230 

Ireland,  Scotch  Covenanters 
in,  19,  21;  famine  of  1846 
in,  71 

Irish  immigrants  in  Chicago, 
71 

Iron  furnace  operated  by 
Cyrus  H.  McCormick,  55-57 

"  Iron  Man,"  Atkins's  self-rake 
Reaper,  106,  107 

Iron,  price  of,  about  1833,  55, 
56 

Italy,  no  central  wheat  market 
in,  222;  wheat  consumption 
and  production  in,  241 


Jacquard,  inventor  of  weaving 
machinery,  53 

Jails,  conditions  in,  8,  9 

Jamestown  colony,  36 

Janesville,  Wis.,  114 

Japan,  object  of,  in  war  with 
Russia,  204;  more  wheat 
consumed  and  raised  in, 
243 

Jefferson,  President,  8,  10, 11, 
15,  16 

Jenks,  Joseph,  of  Lynn,  5 

Johnson,  Reverdy,  91,  98 

Johnson,  Senator,  of  Mary- 
land, 96 

Jones,  William  H.,  104,  120 

K 

Kansas,  51,  85,  204,  230,  231 

Kansas  City,  216 

Kay,  inventor  of  weaving  ma- 
chinery, 53 

Kelly,  inventor,  95 

Kentucky,  Scotch-Irish  in,  20 

Kinglake,  1 

Kinzie,  John,  77 

Knox,  John,  18,  58,  156,  157, 
169 

Koh-i-noor  diamond,  125,  126 

Krapotkin,  Prince,  204 

Kurtz,  Jacob,  58 


Land  sales  from  1810  to  1820, 
11 


[256] 


INDEX 


Law-school,  first  in,  Chicago, 

71 
Lexington   Female   Academy, 

40 

Lexington  Union,  54 
Lexington,  Virginia,    37,    39, 

40 
Licenses  to  manufacturers  of 

McCormick's    Reaper,    66, 

98,  112,  116,  120 
Lilley,  General,  140 
Lincoln,  Abraham,  1,  2, 51,  72, 

91,  99,  100,  191 
Lind,  Jenny,  184 
Liverpool,  221,  222,  225 
Livingstone,  70 
Locke,  Sylvanus  D.,  112,  115 
Locomotives,  early,  49, 50, 192, 

210 
London   Exhibition   of    1851, 

124-127,  130,  131, 190 
London,  no  grain  elevators  in, 

217;  wheat  consumption  of, 

217;     Baltic   Exchange    in, 

221,  222;  methods  of  wheat 

marketing  in,  225 
"Low-down"  binder,  118 
Luther,  Martin,  156,  157,  173 

M 

Mackenzie,expert  Reaper  oper- 
ator, 128 

Mail-order  houses,  free  trial 
given  by,  80 

Manchuria,  wheat  raised  in, 
243 


Manitoba,  Province  of,  225 

Mann,  inventor,  108 

Manny  and  Emerson,  of  Rock- 
ford,  111.,  98,  103,  119 

Manufacturers    licensed    to 
build  McCormick's  Reapers, 
see  under  Licenses 

Marsh,  C.  W.,  45,  46 

"Marsh  Harvester,"  109,  110 

Martineau,  Miss,  76 

Mary,  Queen  of  Scots,  18 

Masses  benefited  by  wheat 
trade,  229 

Massie,  William,  60 

Mazzini,  51 

McChesney,  Adam,  28 

McClung,  Billy,  159 

McClurg,  Alexander  C.,  pub- 
lisher, 21 

McCormick,  Miss  Anita,  see 
Blaine,  Mrs.  Emmons 

McCormick  Centenary,  45 

McCormick  City,  196-202 

McCormick  Company,  pres- 
ent, 98 

McCormick,  Cyrus  Hall,  2,  3, 
11-13,  16-18,  21,  22,  25-28, 
30-35,  37-48,  51-68,  71-85, 
87-105,  109-113,  115-119, 
121-124,  129-191,  193,  195, 
198-202,  208,  230,  244,  246 

McCormick,  Mrs.  Cyrus  H., 
182,  183 

McCormick,  Cyrus  H.,  Jr., 
163,  183,  184,  201 

McCormick,  Davis,  29 


257] 


INDEX 


McCormick  family,  13, 17,  22- 
25,  64,  66,  78 

McCormick,  Harold,  183 

McCormick  home  in  Rock- 
bridge  County,  Virginia,  2, 
3,  13-16,  25,  35-37,  40,  48, 
62 

McCormick,  Leander,  37,  123, 
140,  143,  181,  182 

"McCormick  Plan,"  167 

McCormick,  Robert,  13-17, 
22,  25,  28-31,  40,  45,  104, 
181 

McCormick,  Mrs.  Robert,  23- 
25,  181 

McCormick,  Robert,  son  of 
Cyrus  H.  McCormick,  183 

McCormick,  Stanley,  183,  200 

McCormick  System,  243 

McCormick  Theological  Semi- 
nary, 162,  163 

McCormick,  Thomas,  22 

McCormick,  Miss  Virginia, 
183 

McCormick,  William,  37,  123, 
143,  181,  182 

McDowell,  Col.  James,  40 

Mechi,  John  J.,  127-129,  131 

Mecklenburg,  Virginia,  20 

Melville,  Andrew,  169 

Mendelssohn,  1,  51 

Mexican  War,  Chicago  organ- 
ized regiment  for,  71 

Michigan  white  ash  used  in 
manufacture  of  Reapers,  74 

Miller,  Lewis,  104,  120 


Milwaukee,  73 
Minneapolis,  215,  235-237 
Minnesota,  51,  193,  217 
Mississippi  River,  50 
Missouri,  63 
Moore,  James,  40 
Morgan,  Junius,  131,  155 
Mormons,  69 
Morse,  21,  95,  131 
Morton,  Dr.,  69 
Mount  Vernon  flour-mill,  234 
Mower,  Miller's,  120 

N 

Napoleon,  4,  10 
Napoleon  III,  Emperor,   134, 

135 

Nebraska,  51 
New  Albany,  Ind.,  Seminary, 

162 

New  England,  230 
"New  process"  flour-mills,  235 
New  York  City,  4,  6,  8,  9,  37, 

52,  119,  160,  216 
Newspapers  in  1831,  50 
Newton,  John,  59 
Niagara    Falls,   power    from, 

216 

North  Dakota,  85,  232 
Northwestern          Theological 

Seminary,  162 
Norway,  speculation  in  grain 

in,  225;    wheat  production 

in,  241,  242 
Novorossisk,     Russia,     grain 

elevator  at,  216,  217 


[258] 


INDEX 


O 

Oats  stored  at  Chicago,   215 
Odessa,  217 

Ogden,  William  B.,  75-78 
Ohio,  64,  67,  242 
Oklahoma,  69 
Oliver,  James,  49 
Opium  traffic,  204 
Oregon,  242 

Oriental  method  of  chaffering 

and  bargaining,  vogue  of,  81 

Osborne,  David  M.,  103,  120 


Pacific  coast,  no  grain  eleva- 
tors on,  216 

Page,  Prof.,  95 

Palissy,  53 

Papers  in  1831,  48 

"Parcimony  in  Nutrition,"  204 

Paris  Exposition  (1855),   133 

Paris,  no  grain  stored  in,  217; 
Bourse  in,  222 

Parker,  J.,  63 

Pasteur,  51 

Patent,  Cyrus  H.  McCor- 
mick's  first,  "on  Reaper,  59; 
expiration  of  original,  91; 
suits  over  extension  of,  91- 
98 

Patent  Law,  91 

Patent  Office,  91-93,  95,  185 

Patents  for  Reaper  and  mower 
inventions,  34,  41;  suits 
over,  45,  90-98;  for  self- 
binders,  118 


Patton,  Dr.  Francis  L.,  172 
Paupers  in  period  of  1809,  8 
Paved  streets,  none  in  Chicago 

when  Cyrus  H.  McCormick 

came,  70 

Peabody,  George,  131,  155 
Peavey,  F.  H.,  214 
Pennsylvania    Railroad,    158; 

see  also  Baggage  Case 
Pericles,     mills    in    time    of, 

236 

Peterborough,  N.  H.,  50 
Photography,  49 
Pillsbury,  Minneapolis  miller, 

236 

Pittsburg,  Pa.,  74 
Platform  on  Reaper,  origin  of, 

33 

Plow,  hillside,  45,  81 
Plow,  iron,  thought  to  poison 

soil,  5;  invention  of,  49 
Plow,  self-sharpening,  45 
Poe,  1,  51 
Police    force    of    Chicago    in 

1847,  70 

Polish  female  laborers,  197 
Pompeii,  bread  found  in  ruins 

of,  234 

Poorhouses     used     as     store- 
houses for  wheat,  230 
Portugal,  241 
Post-office,  Chicago,  in  1847, 

70 

Postage  in  1831,  50 
Postage  stamps,  70 
Postal  Union,  233 


[  259  ] 


INDEX 


"Prairie  Ground,"  American 
display  at  London  Exhibi- 
tion of  1851,  126 

Prairies,  need  of  Reapers  to 
harvest  on  the,  65,  73;  uncul- 
tivated before  advent  of 
Reaper,  67 

Prairie  States,  ten,  230 

Presbyterian  Church,  158,  185, 
186 

Princeton  University,  172 

Protestant  Reformation,  156, 
185 

Proudhon,  1,  51 

Publicity,  Cyrus  H.  McCor- 
mick  believed  in  policy  of,  81 

Puddling-furnace,  17 

Pyramids,  wheat  pictured  on, 
206 

R 

Railway  from  Chicago  to  Ga- 
lena, 76 

Railways  in  1831,  49;  extend- 
ing westward,  67;  none 
reaching  Chicago  when  Cy- 
rus H.  McCormick  came, 
70;  Chicago  becomes  a 
centre  for,  73;  preceded  by 
Reaper  in  West,  192;  dis- 
tribution of  food-stuffs  by, 
210,  211;  building  of  trans- 
continental, 211;  across  Si- 
beria, 212;  in  western 
Canada,  Argentina,  ancf  In- 
dia, 212;  as  wheat-convey- 
ors, 212;  converging  at 


Chicago,  214;  in  Prairie 
States,  230 

Ready-to-eat  foods,  237 

Reaper,  McCormick,  13,  17, 
28-48,  52-67,  73-76,  78-86, 
88,  89,  92,  95-98,  100,  103- 
108, 110-113,  115,  117, 119- 
124,  126-135,  137,  138,  147, 
166,  169,  170,  188-193,  195, 
196,  200-203,  208,  210,  212, 
214,  226,  227,  230,  243-246 

Reapers  of  all  makes,  total 
annual  production  of,  209 

Reciprocating  blade,  origin  of, 
32 

Red  River  Valley,  194,  231, 
232 

Reed,  Col.  Samuel,  40 

Reel,  origin  of,  33,  46 

Republican  party,  100 

Revolutionary  War,  3,  20 

Rice,  205,  212,  242 

Riots  in  1837,  52 

"River  and  Harbor  Conven- 
tion," Chicago,  71,  72 

Rochester,  N.  Y.,  234 

Rockbridge  County,  Virginia, 
McCormick  farm  in,  2 

Rotterdam,  wheat  stored  in, 
217 

Roumania,  242 

Roumanian  cities  use  concrete 
grain  elevators,  216 

Rubber  manufacture,  inventor 
of,  53 

Ruff,  John,  38,  40 


[260] 


INDEX 


Russia,  farm  laborers  received 
no  wages  in,  123;  in  war 
with  Japan,  204;  develop- 
ment of,  228;  wheat  produc- 
tion, consumption,  and  ex- 
portation in,  242;  famines 
in,  242 

Russian  army  in  Sweden 
(1809),  4 

Russo-Japanese  War,  204 


Sailors  become  farmers,  11 

St.  Louis,  Mo.,  73,  216 

Sales  system  of  Cyrus  H.  Mc- 

Cormick,  47,  78  et  seq. 
Saratoga,  N.  Y.,  7 
Sault  Ste.  Marie  Canal,  210 
Sauvage,     inventor    of    screw 

propeller,  53 
School  attended  by  Cyrus  H. 

McCormick,  26 
Scotch-Irish,  the,  17-23,  25,  29 
Scotland,  18,  74 
Screw  propeller,  inventor  of,  53 
Scribner,    Charles,    publisher, 

21 

Scythe,  invention  of,  5 
Secession,  War  of,  100,  166- 

168,  191,  192 
Self-binders,  110-115, 117,118, 

121,  208-210,  238 
Self-rake  Reapers,    106,    107, 

110,  114 
Self-sizing    device,    Gorham's 

invention  of,  117 


Seneca,  quoted,  154 

Serfs,  15,  124 

Servia,  conditions  in  (1809),  4 

Sevres  porcelain,  53 

Seward,  William  H.,  91,  98, 

155 
Sewerage,    none    in    Chicago 

when  Cyrus  H.  McCormick 

came,  70 
Sewing-machine,    17,    49,    60, 

131,210 
Seymour,  Morgan   &  Co.,  66, 

116,  119,  120 

Sheffield  steel  used  in   manu- 
facture of  Reapers,  74 
Sherwood   farm,    near   Elgin, 

111.,  Ill 
Shipping,     Chicago    becomes 

centre  for,  73,  215 
Siberia,  Russia  seeking  seaport 

for,  204;  wheat  crop  of,  209, 

217;     railway   across,    212; 

development  of,  228;  might 

take  lesson  from  Red  River 

Valley,  231 

Sickle,  its  use  in  1809,  5 
Side-draught    construction    of 

Reaper,  33,  34 
Side-delivery     machine,     first 

practical,  46 
Skulls,  pyramid  of,  4 
Slaves,  work  of,  191 
Smith,  Abraham,  60,  62 
Smith,  Joshua,  57 
Smith,  Sidney,  130 
Social  conditions  in  1809,  7-9 


[261] 


INDEX 


Solomon,  206 

South  Carolina,  97 

Spain,  in  1809,  4;  wheat  im- 
ported by,  241 

Spaulding,  George  H.,  115 

Speculators,    grain,    224,    225 

Spencer,  Herbert,  51 

Spring,  Charles,  143 

Stanton,  Edwin  M.,  91,  99 

Staunton,  Virginia,  2,  40,  57, 
58,  60 

Steamboat,  invention  of,  210 

Steele,  Eliza,  37 

Steele,  John,  37,  40 

Steele's  Tavern,  Virginia,  37 

Stewart,  A.  T.,  21,81 

Stock-yards  not  located  at 
Chicago  when  Cyrus  H. 
McCormick  came,  70 

Storage  of  wheat,  213,  214 

Suez  Canal,  70,  210 

Sulina,  217,  218 

Surveying,  Cyrus  H.  McCor- 
mick's  study  of,  27 

Sweden  in  1809,  4;  specula- 
tion in  grain  in,  224;  wheat 
production  in,  241,  242 

Switzerland,  225,  242 

T 

Taylor,  Dr.,  40 
Taylor,  Hon.  William,  39,  40 
Tecumseh,  4 
Tehuantepec         Inter-Ocean 

Railroad,  144 
Telegraph,  49,  50,  70,  131,  210 


Telephone,  210 

Temperance  society  at  Sara- 
toga, 7 

Tennessee,  Scotch-Irish  in,  20; 
first  Reaper  purchased  in, 
63;  comparison  of  grain 
production  of,  242 

Tennyson,  1,  51 

Texas,  Scotch-Irish  in,  20; 
not  in  the  Union  in  1831, 
51 

Theatres  in  early  Chicago,  70, 
71 

Thompson,  J.  Edgar,  101 

Tilden,  76,  165 

Times,  Chicago,  166 

Times,  London,  130 

Town  and  city  dwellers,  pro- 
portion of,  195,  196 

Town  laborers  become  farm- 
ers, 11 

Trans-Siberian  railway,  212 

Transportation  charges  on 
wheat,  213 

Transportation  of  Reapers 
from  Virginia  farm,  64 

Tribune,  of  Chicago,  founded, 
71 

Trolley,  introduction  of,  210 

Tunis,  242 

Turks  in  Servia  (1809),  4 

Tutwiler,  Colonel,  63 

Twine-mill  in'  McCormick 
factory,  Chicago,  197 

Twine  self-binders,  115-118, 
121 


[262] 


INDEX 


Tyre,  King  of,  206 
Tyrol,  riot  in  (1809),  4 

U 

Ulster,  county  of,  19,  21,  22 
Union    Army    in    Rockbridge 

County,  Virginia,  36 
Union  Pacific  Railway,  144 
United  States,  in  1809,  4  et 
seq.;  Scotch-Irish  in,  18-21; 
papers  printed  in  (1831),  48; 
railways  in  (1831),  49;  ex- 
tent and  development  of 
(1831),  50;  Buffalo  chief 
grain  market  of,  69;  London 
Exposition  display  from,  126; 
inventions  credited  to,  130; 
reasons  why  Reapers  were 
invented  in,  136,  201;  Mc- 
Cormick's  place  in  history 
of,  153 ;  production  of  wheat 
in,  188,  189;  manufacturing 
and  labor  in  (1884),  189; 
Reaper  little  used  in,  until 
after  1849,  190;  Reaper  ap- 
preciated in,  191;  industrial 
supremacy  of,  195,  229; 
harvesting  machinery  indus- 
try in,  201;  wheat  crop  of, 
209;  cost  of  production  of 
wheat  in,  209;  railway  across, 
211 ;  grain  inspection  in,  222; 
speculation  in,  225;  culti- 
vation of  semi-arid  land  in, 
228;  consumption  of  bread 
in,  239;  area  and  popula- 


tion of,  compared  with  In- 
dia, 242,  243 


Van  Buren,  Martin,  76,  178 
Vermont    hay    crop,    relative 

value  of,  5 

Victoria,  Queen,  125,  132 
Virchow,  51 
"Virginia  Reapers,"  64 
Virginia,  Scotch-Irish  in,  20; 

main  wheat  State  in  1831, 51, 

193;  supremacy  passing  to 

Ohio,  67 

W 

Wages  of  harvesters  at  time 
of  introduction  of  Reaper, 
38 

Wallace,  Andrew,  40 

Wallace,  Henry,  106,  107 

Wallace's  Farmer,  106 

Walton,  N.  Y.,  76 

Warder,  Reaper  manufacturer, 
103,  120 

Warehouses  at  Reaper  agen- 
cies, 83,  84 

Warfare,  expenses  of  modern, 
233 

Washburn,  William  D.,  235, 
236 

Washington,  George,  5,  6,  11, 
15,17,20,81,234 

Washington  State,  238 

Watson,  Peter  H.,  91,99 

Watt,  131 


[  263  ] 


INDEX 


Weaving  machinery,  inventors 
of,  53 

Webster,  Daniel,  15,  76,  95, 
164 

Weed,  Thurlow,  72, 

West,  orders  for  Reapers  from 
the,  63;  transportation  to  the, 
64;  McCormick  visits  the, 
65;  need  of  quicker  method 
of  cutting  grain  in  the, 
65,  66;  Chicago  helped  by 
use  of  Reaper  in,  73;  Mc- 
Cormick 's  policy  devel- 
oped the,  86;  Reaper  pre- 
ceded railway  in  the,  192; 
wheat  crop  of  the,  193; 
railways  in  the,  211;  Reap- 
er advance-machine  of  civ- 
ilization in,  227 

Wet  grain,  adaptation  of  the 
Reaper  to  cut,  33,  61,  62 

"  Whaleback"  grain  ships,  210 

Wheat,  51,  67,  69,  70,  73, 188- 
196,201,203,205^5^. 

Wheat  Congress,  international, 
233 

Wheat-ships,  210-213 

Whiteley,  William  N.,  45,  46, 
120, 150 


Whitney,  Eli,  52,  97,  191 
Whittier,  51 

Willmoth,  improver  of  battle- 
ship turret,  95 
Wilson  family  from  Ayrshire, 

Scotland,  86 
Wilson,  Hon.  James,  86,  87, 

192 
Winnipeg    Grain    Exchange, 

225 
Wire    self-binders      displaced 

by  twine  self-binders,  115— 

117 

Wisconsin,  50,  63,  114 
Withington,  Charles  B.,  109- 

115 

Wood,  Jethro,  49,  53 
Wood,  Walter  A.,  103, 112, 120 
Woodworth,  inventor,  95 
World's  Fair,  Chicago,  1893, 

124 

Wright,  Joseph  A.,  134 
Written  guarantees  given  with 

McCormick  Reapers,   79 


Yellow  fever  in  the  McCor- 
mick family,   16 


264 


14  DAY  USE 

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JAN  1 9 1999 


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